A bit of sad news came out of the tech industry today, Ilya Zhitomirskiy has passed away.

If you’re unfamiliar with Zhitomirskiy, he was one of the four co-founders of Diaspora, a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service. It’s been rumored that Diaspora could eventually become a direct competitor to Facebook.

The death of Zhitomirskiy is pretty hard to grasp, he was only 22. The exact cause of his death is unknown at this time. If you’d like to read more about Zhitomirskiy, you can visit FamousDead.com.

Our thoughts go out to his friends and family.

Below is a video of the Diaspora team discussing their project.

Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network from daniel grippi on Vimeo.