Ilya Zhitomirskiy, A New Media Evolutionary and  the co-founder of the open-source Facebook alternative Diaspora, has passed away at the age of 22. The cause of death is not publicly known but it has surely made social media lose an evolutionary.

Ilya had created the open Source  along with Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg and Raphael Sofaer as part of a project while they were students at New York University. Diaspora was created as a response to Facebook’s controversial privacy changes in 2010. The team was able to raise $200,000 on Kickstarter to launch the project.

UPDATE: CNN reported this afternoon that the cause of death was suicide.

What Did Ilya Zhitomirskiy’s Diaspora Do:

Diaspora lets you sort your connections into groups called aspects. Unique to Diaspora, aspects ensures that your photos, stories and jokes are shared only with the people you intend. You own your pictures, and you shouldn’t have to give that up just to share them. You maintain ownership of everything you share on Diaspora, giving you full control over how it’s distributed. Diaspora makes sharing clean and easy – and this goes for privacy too. Inherently private, Diaspora doesn’t make you wade through pages of settings and options just to keep your profile secure.

Ilya Zhitomirskiy’s Motto:

“Share what you want, with whom you want.” : Diaspora

Our thoughts and condolences go out to Zhitomirskiy’s family and friends.

Ilya Zhitomirskiy’s Diaspora has left us to think about other relative alternatives which allows webmasters to engage in development of impressive open sources. We have listed some of them which will prove to be important for every webmaster or website designer when it comes to working on Social Networks, Security ensuring platforms and other cool web products and API’s. We have listed some of them in the following Article:

Open Source Alternatives For Social Networks