Motribe is a brand new mobile startup that just launched from the beautiful city of Cape Town.

Motribe is a platform that allows anyone, anywhere to build, manage and generate revenue from their own mobile social communities.  It provides a simple and easy way for enthusiasts, brands and community managers to launch social networks optimised for the mobile web.  It alleviates the initial investment of building and testing and puts a powerful set of functionality onto your mobile service right away.

To put it simple, with Motribe just about anybody can now run their very own mobile social network according to how they would like it with features such as Chatrooms, Broadcast Messages, Blogs, Photo Sharing and even Analytics and support for Advertisements so you can monitize your mobile social network.

Go check out Motribe to start your very own mobile social network, or check out the current mobile social networks available on Motribe.

Remember a few month back when word first got out about Diaspora, the open source “Facebook Killer”? Well they guys behind Diaspora has been working hard and have set a date when they will release their code.

The four NYU students have been coding away the past couple of months and at the beginning of last month put up a short demo of what they have been working. Now in a new blog post by the team they have set the date to release the code to public on 15 September 2010 by issuing the following statement: ”We have been coding. We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th.”

Will the team of NYU students continue to improve on Diaspora after they open source the code on 15 September? The short answer is yes. In the blog post they also stated “We aren’t going to stop working after we release. Ilya and Raphael are taking leave from NYU, and we will continue to develop and maintain Diaspora as a long term project. We have shifted our development timeline accordingly, and the first release will be the beginning of something great, not a finished summer project.”

If Diaspora is anything to go by from what I have seen on their demo videos they may just have a success on their hands. Whether Diaspora is a “Facebook Killer” we will just have to wait and see, chances of users moving to another social network are slim unless you can convince you friends to move along, who knows maybe Diaspora can achieve this.

Will you make use of Diaspora once they release their code to the public?

When it comes to social networking it is without a doubt that Facebook is the leader with over 400 million users. The dream of four NYU student is to change that by focusing on Facebooks non existing privacy with their open source alternative called Diaspora.

Diaspora’s aim is to provide a privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.

The question is whether Diaspora will succeed in becoming a competitor to Facebook. Up until now open source alternatives to popular social networking giants hasn’t had any success, identica almost came close, will this be the same for Diaspora?

Diaspora has asked bidders on online fundraising site Kickstart for an amount of $10,000 which they initially aimed to get in 39 days. Response to Diaspora’s funding request has been so good that they already have their total bids standing at $87,940 in only a matter of 12 days.

Diaspora’s aim is to have everybody control their own social network and have them decide to whom they want to display their information and when they want to display it.

If Diaspora will succeed in their quest to give users a more personal and private social network we will just have to see. There is still a couple of days of funding left and I wouldn’t be surprised if they reach the one million dollar mark.

Would you use a service like Diaspora rather than Facebook if it means you have more control over your information?