Diaspora Co-Founder Commits Suicicde

A 22-year-old social networking pioneer and Internet privacy advocate who dared to challenge Facebook and Google is dead.

Ilya Zhitomirskiy died Saturday after San Francisco police were summoned for a reported suicide, police spokesman Officer Albie Esparza said.

Mr Zhitomirskiy was one of the founders Diaspora, a new social networking service meant to give users more control of their information online, and sought to lure people away from bigger sites like Facebook, Google and Twitter.
Zhitomirskiy, together with Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg and Raphael Sofaer were students from New York University’s Courant Instutitue of Mathematical Sciences, created the project “Diaspora” that was released on November 23, 2010 is intended to address privacy concerns related to centralized social etworks by allowing users set up their own server (or “pod”) to host content; pods can then interact to share status updates, photographs, and other social data.

The cause of Zhitomirskiy’s death wasn’t immediately known but source close to the company told CNNMoney on Sunday that he committed suicide.

According to this source, Zhitomirskiy’s mother had not hear his son in 3 days, so she called one of his roommates at the apartment and they found out a horrible and shocking situation after they broke down Ilya’s bedroom door.

It was indeed a carefully planned and executed suicide because Ilya left a detailed suicide note that explained why he decided to take his own life.



Diaspora Co-Founder Commits Suicicde