Diaspora*, the open-sourced and distributed community of social networks run by users that enables users to own their own personal data, control with whom you share, and discover cool stuff throughout the Web, lost an important part of their team.

Ilya Zhitomirskiy, co-founder of Diaspora*, died at the ripe age of 22 on November 12.  Zhitomirskiy is one of the four co-founders of Diaspora*, along with Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer.  The cause of death still hasn’t been confirmed.

“Shocked and deeply sad for the world that my friend @zhitomirskiyi, co-founder of Diaspora, is dead… The world needed his voice,” said one-time Mozilla user interface guru Aza Raskin.

Though the entire team is saddened by his passing, life carries on, and I think anyone who started a business would want the business to go on amidst unfortunate circumstances.

Diaspora* sent out a new batch of invites to their revamped alpha version of open-source social network yesterday.  The open-source social network is known for hashtag following, direct messages, status update Like buttons, a notifications channel, etc. ever since launching about a year ago.  They’ve now added a few more features that kind of work  like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Tumblr all rolled into one.

Diaspora now has ‘Aspects’ which is kind of like Goolge+’s Circles so whatever you wish to publish, you can choose to either publish that publicly or just to certain Aspects.  You can also sync your account to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr so whatever you publish in Diaspora will be seen in your other social network accounts.

But of all their new features, cubbi.es would probably be the most plugged of all.  Cubbi.es is a photosharing feature of Diaspora.  You just need to verify your Diaspora account and download the needed extension for Chrome or Firefox to activate the feature.  Cubbi.es allows one to share any photo on the web by just simply holding the shift key then clicking on the desired image to share it.

These new features may be the fruition of Zhitomirskiy’s goal to create a decentralized social network that “lets you be yourself and share however you want, with or without your real name.”  So the launch of the revamped site is indeed a tribute to Zhitomirskiy in its own way.

From all of us here at SiliconANGLE, we extend our sympathies and condolences to Ilya Zhitomirskiy’s family and friends.  The tech world lost another great mind.