I’m a great believer in the potential of open, decentralised platforms to disrupt and disintermediate incumbents, particularly in the social media space.

I’ve been keeping my fingers crossed that the students behind Diaspora will make good on their idea of building an open competitor to Facebook (although, with nearly a year now passed since they raised over $200,000 on Kickstarter, my optimism is waning).

The Tahrir Project is the brainchild of Ian Clarke, who intends to build a “distributed, decentralized, anonymous Twitter”. It’s an idea with huge potential and, given that Ian has a very strong track record in this space, having previously developed Freenet, I’m going to be monitoring its progress with a lot of interest.