Ilya Zhitomirskiy Tribute

Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of co-founders of the social network Diaspora, has died at age 22, TechCrunch reported today. The cause and date of his death were not reported.

Zhitomirskiy was one of four New York University programming students who last year launched Diaspora, which is designed as an open-source alternative to Facebook. Their intention was to build "an open source personal web server that will put individuals in control of their data." A commercial alpha version was released November 23, 2010. The group has raised more than $200,000 in donations using a fundraising platform start-up called Kickstarter.