Four talented hackers from NYU are planning to spend the summer building Diaspora “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network”.

This is a particularly timely project in the wake of the recent “open” graph announcements at F8 and the debate about data ownership.

Project Diaspora will be open-source, with a subscription hosted solution. They’re raising money to pay for their time developing the project over the summer.

You can read more about the project and the business plan and pledge your support on their Kickstarter page.