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Comment by iSnow | Hacker News Reader

>an open social network or a open search engine

Please don't! This has been both tried before and it ended in a waste of resources, money (Diaspora, anyone?) and goodwill.

You can't beat the network effect of a social network with "we are open source", people don't care that much. You either have a usecase no one else has thought about, a technical killer feature or you don't try.

With a search engine, the network effect is not as big, but you better deliver something consistently better than Google right from the start.

Both are not fields ripe for disruption as the web browser game was in the mid-2000's.

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Well really, open source doesn't mean anything in the context of a Website. So what if you have the source code Google uses to run their query engine, crawlers and index if you dint have all of their data. The same applies to facebook.

The Open Data movement is more applicable here. With that in mind there is Common Crawl and Open Street Maps.

The thing about collecting data out of good will or for some nonprofit mission is that you have different standards, motivations and methods for connecting data than for public for-profit corporations. Some data should not be collected, at least without permission. Privacy and copyrights are issues Google and Facebook deal with after the fact not before they collect the data.

Do you have any sense of proportion? FB is worth hundreds of BILLIONs and somebody wasted $500K or whatever on diaspora...thats not a waste of resources its a single FTE for at one of these companies today....Or do you have something else in mind?

I doubt the average FTE at FB costs 500 grant, but whatever. The point is, Diaspora didn't get that money from google or one of the giants who could care less. And it is now gone without making a lot of a splash.

But in the end, that's kind of my point - FB is humongous and I hope Mozilla does not pick a fight there. As much as I despise FB, I'd rather Mozilla enters the competitions they can win.

This is a common misguided sense of what "winning" is.

Mozilla's contribution to the web, is not that they have the most popular browser, but they have a browser with enough users that they get a seat at the table to influence open standards.

And there is no reason they shouldn't replicate the model and expand that sphere of influence into other domains. Diaspora failing is not a good enough reason to bend over to Zuckerberg.

>that they have the most popular browser, but they have a browser with enough users

Well yes, but they arrived at this by having a vision what a good browser is at a time when browsers were abysmal. They didn't arrive there by just wanting an open-source browser. Yes, there was a network effect at play too (everyone "optimized" for MSIE), but they were able to bootstrap their user base with the tech-savvy who were fed up with the horrible HTML/CSS/JS support browsers of the time offered.

They did not have that vision with FirefoxOS - they wanted to secure a foothold in the mobile market, but had no compelling idea on how to gain that in the face of Apple/Google. Similarly, disliking Zuck is a a really bad reason to pour energy into yet another open social network.

For what it's worth, Diaspora kind of sucks at the moment but it's not gone. Federation works, so it will probably be a good while before the network of Pods gone entirely.

Search does not have to be better it just has to be good and more private. See e.g. duckduckgo

I try to use DuckDuckGo by default, but I have to switch to Google very often to get decent results.

This is constantly improving and if you have any relevancy issue examples you can always reach out (adam@duckduckgo.com).

Also if we're your default you can always use !g to forward a search to encrypted.google.com if the results don't meet your needs. In fact you can forward your search to over 6000 sites (https://duckduckgo.com/bang) and even suggest your own bangs :)

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