Distributed Facebook replacement Diaspora pledged 2x the funding it requested
kickstarter.com
kickstarter.com
Facebook's real problem is not user backlash from their privacy shortcomings, but the future of social networking in general. Some visionary will beat them to the future while they are busy milking the status quo.
This is not visionary, sorry.
I'd say the most important thing is to deal with the social flatland problem (which I explain here: http://interuserface.net/2010/02/buzz-facebook-and-social-fl...), and then pretty much follow every suggestion Joey Tyson makes in this post: http://theharmonyguy.com/2010/05/10/dont-simply-build-a-more... .
If that kind of advancement can be built into a well-engineered product with good UX, then we might really be looking at something that could start siphoning a bit of market share from Facebook.
This is the Craigslist secret sauce.
All early internet protocols where distributed before the web became companies playground and Conway law followed.
I think a visionary replacement will happen when something will just replace the cloud (which is too often a data ghetto) by giving users a way to easily and completely control their data and services, local as well as remote, in a homogeneous and synchronized way. A merge between the two approaches: "everything on the web" and "everything on your computer". Data (and metadata) and services being identities, media, documents, events, tags, access rights, version history, and links between all those things... So all this without giving all your data to google :)
Maybe positioning a competitor as "guaranteed to always be free" could be a better plan (even when FB will likely always be free).
But if you read their project description, it doesn't sound like what they're building only duplicates Facebook's functionality. They're talking about providing software to give you your own portable persistent data vault, that you can selectively allow other people & services to access, while keeping the ability to remove their access at any time.
That's pretty cool, and it has the potential for a lot more uses than what Facebook is doing.
Based on their posts, they appear to be positioning themselves as a "Facebook Killer" solely to take advantage of the current backlash against Facebook (considering their current funding, I would say it's working). What they are attempting to create transcends anything we currently have; the closest you might come would be if you hosted a cryptographically secured peer-to-peer server only your friends could access (once you have that, now make it easily replicable and spread it across the net).
Get all of the above stuff, plus access to the nightly build server for Diaspora, so you can check out our progress all summer!
Huh? Wouldn't that already be public? This sounds like a cool project, but the secretive way of doing things is worrying. If I wanted that, I'd use Facebook.
EDIT: On further inspection, it looks as if this is open source, but only four months from now. Really guys? Is that your way of making this more open than Facebook?
Let public demand and old-fashioned nighttime/weekend hacking kick start the project.
"...If you want to see what we are up to, we will be hanging out on the GNU Social mailing list, as well as a few other places as we work on defining some common protocols between like minded projects."
Two major red flags for me:
1. Money up front to a team of unknowns
2. Secluding your work for a big unveiling down the road
I wish them all the best but I think they were the surprise beneficiaries of a strong anti-FB sentiment, nothing more.
His mum is a smart lady.
In any case, that's A LOT harder than mistakingly making sensitive information public in a social network like Facebook
This group seems to have some good energy but I agree with a lot of others about the name - they should definitely change it to something easier to spell and say.
Time will tell, good luck from me.
Is diaspora hard to pronounce in English?
"The name 'Apache' was chosen from respect for the various Native American nations collectively referred to as Apache, well-known for their superior skills in warfare strategy and their inexhaustible endurance. It also makes a cute pun on "a patchy web server" -- a server made from a series of patches -- but this was not its origin. The group of developers who released this new software soon started to call themselves the "Apache Group"." (from the Apache Foundation website).
GIMP, while maybe a little less tasteful, at least is simply an acronym for GNU image manipulation program.
Neither of those examples resonate with the same connotations as "diaspora" (edit) to me. I can respect that the examples you listed might strike others in that way, however.
I think it’s mostly irrelevant that Gimp is an acronym. As an extreme case, if the initials of my descriptively named project happen to spell the N-word, people would be right to question my taste if I ran with it. Obviously “Apache” is not the same as the N-word, but you can see the point. It doesn’t matter if the connotations in my mind are only wholesome: I’m assigning to symbols that are already bound in outer contexts, and that’s dangerous in human culture.
I’m not trying to be the political correctness police here. It’s not my job to get angry on other people’s behalf – I’m not Apache or physically disabled. But I would think very hard before calling a project anything like Apache or Gimp, and to me they seem at least as bad as Diaspora.
Anyway, I do see how a reasonable person could hold your position.
I'm not out to be overly politically correct either, for the same reason - I don't fall into the category of anyone who could actually relate personally to the notion of diaspora. My personal reaction was negative, others here seem to like the name plenty enough. To each their own in this regard.
Which is not to say that I disagree with you.
And there're already open-source implementation of this framework under the Apache license, http://shindig.apache.org/
I've 'ported' java shindig to C# .NET but it kinda sucks going at it alone. http://code.google.com/p/pesta/, http://raya.codeplex.com
I wonder why there aren't more people interested in contributing. Coz my code sucks?
Humble also!
I guess it's protection so if someone finds a glaring mistake, or several, they can just say "I told you so!".
At a certain point, you have to stop thinking about what your skill level is and start just doing. Spolsky used the term Architecture Astronaut, which I definitely was going in to my first job out of college. Now, I rarely think about architecture up front, I think about requirements and the fastest path to them, with the post step of eliminating repetition. This ties into YAGNI and 7 Habits and OODA and all kinds of different decision making strategies that it just feels right through and through. Architecture seems to fall out from that and makes up for a lot of my own failings for design.
Point being: we're all at certain level X, and our relative level compared to other people isn't important, it's what we do with our personal level to develop and deploy projects. I've seen pure procedural code written in object oriented languages that got the project done and got it done well. I've seen object oriented systems with perfectly defined abstraction hierarchies fall over on itself. Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing against OOP with those examples, just saying "Code Elegance" be damned, you can't argue with "Shipped".
Where was I going with this? I forget... oh well.
I don't know, maybe it's cultural. In 13 years in the industry I never ever met anyone who bluntly referred themselves as "talented programmer". And a few actually had grand egos..
But good luck to them with the project anyway. I like the idea, just that the opening line was sorta gross.
The worst thing is being aware of it, though. "Man, I suck... which must mean I'm awesome! Which must mean I suck..."
It's a horrible infinite loop.
hehe
That's actually my main complaint about Facebook right now. It's been slapped together by college-level programmers, who are just about the least talented level you can bother considering as employable. If anything, I wouldn't be surprised if their stance on privacy weren't an ideological one but a technical one, i.e., they couldn't figure out how to make their bodged together system keep from leaking information like a sieve, so they called it a feature rather than a bug.
I sometimes have the opposite feeling: "Hey, I did so much interesting stuff back then, and learned a lot. Am I still at the same level?"
My abilities may have been lower back then, but I sometimes get the feeling that the rate of progress was higher.
I'm trying to correct that now, and I'm starting to see results, but it's slow, especially now that I just moved to a new city. One of the ways that I've used to force myself to get things done is to set up disincentives for failure, i.e. I will buy the hosting for a project as soon as I have the first prototype done, so the longer it takes me to finish, the more money I'm wasting having an unfinished project sitting around. Another way is to start releasing my code on CodePlex, which tends to force me to document things a lot better. Of course, those are things that are more suited to my personality: the perfectionist in me was what prevented me from releasing, so forcing myself to release brings out the completionist in me.
Really, what I need is my own personal secretary/intern to keep notes for me and finish the dirty work on my projects :D
Have you tried specifically scheduling some time for secretary/itern-mode?
dieaspora dyaspora dyasporah
You won't say that to your parents and guarantee they get it right first time when typing it in (although I guess that's what Google is for. Did you mean...).
It's a hurdle, and one they need to fix if there's any chance of this being a "distributed Facebook replacement"
Do we have to optimize everything for those of limited literacy or vocabulary? I hope not.
Besides, no: you don't have to optimize for the unwashed masses. But if you're making something to compete with Facebook, the most Unwashed Masses site since MySpace, you probably should if you want to be successful.
I think your argument may be increasingly good as more browsers merge their search field with their URL field like Chrome does. On that note, it'd be interesting to see numbers on how often people enter URL-like strings into their browser's search field and then click the first link that comes back.
It's true that the value of membership in something like Facebook depends heavily on the network effect (allowing you to easily find all your friends there), and without a large community a project like Diaspora is unlikely to acquire sufficient utility to be more than a curiosity. But I really don't think the name will be a major barrier, either to ease of communication or due to semantic association. I stopped worrying about this after we got past questions like 'shouldn't it be W-W-W period com?' and 'what about people who are afraid of spiders?' etc.
I do think names are very important. There's a naturalness with which Normals say "do you have a Facebook?" that they don't seem likely (to me) to have with "Diaspora".
I think that an admirable trait of nerds/geeks/whatever is that many can easily separate symbols from their cultural meanings/connotations. We can treat "diaspora" independently, understanding its subtly ironic meaning (most of us don't think the Facebook diaspora is nearly as significant as other historical diasporas, but we don't take a site's usage of this name to diminish this history, either) but many would interpret such a 'flippant' use as mocking their cultural heritage and the struggles of their forebears.
One has to know one's customers. And ain't nothin' offensive about "Facebook".
... to go even more meta, "googol" is a corruption of "google" - as the name was suggested by Kasner's (the mathematician) nephew. It was the last name of Kasner's newphew's favourite comic character, Barney Google.
True (and good point), but they also don't get the benefits of the mentorship, the alumni & mentor connections, and the shared drive of being with 10 other groups doing the same thing.
Even if I had an idea which I could self fund, I would still consider applying to Y Combinator, as the experience and networking you would receive would definitely benefit a project greatly.
The only thing that gets on my wick a bit about Kick-starter is that the funders essentially get nothing (other than see the product get created). I.E. This product could go on to be valued at millions and you're initial $1000 contribution to the seed funding would be unrewarded.
At least, that's what Kickstarter sort of proposes with their model.
It seems to me this would allow the service provider approach and the ability to also have a commercial part (like the Funambol dual licensing approach...i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funambol). This doesn't seem like an overtly nefarious scheme to reach for your $5 :-)
Project website: http://joindiaspora.com/
Obviously, not everyone shares my opinion considering they got 200+% funding in two weeks, but I was wholly unconvinced, most specifically by the "why us?" section - if you can't answer that question instinctively and convincingly, then (again, if I were the one doing the choosing) the answer would clearly be "not you."
Though I can think of a few other places I've seen it... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointer_(computing)
However, they need to immediately purge from their presentation any ideas of "server" or anything sounding so hard for an average joe.
I realize it's just a start, but if v1 doesn't have a "click here to start your private seed" that's hosted on a cloud somewhere they are going to have a hard time growing.
If your momma can't use it to confidently and securely share pics in < 5 minutes, it's a waste of time.
But it does look promising :)
That is the most self-contained codebase I had seen so far out of the few I studied (OneSocialWeb.com and DiSo-project.org do look more technologically advanced, but they have more dependencies).
I'd love to be wrong, though.
It usually means you got kicked out of a place.
Can a user belong to as many nodes as he or she wants? Can a user run as many nodes as he or she wants?
Is a node a real, physical thing or just a co-opted version of the networking term?
What would it mean for an end user to belong to two nodes versus ten nodes?
You know, the same kind of friend that uploads photos of you drunk.
I have no idea how they plan to build their network, so I can't help you with that.
It is impossible to repeat the success of facebook (in terms of number of users and popularity), same as it is impossible to repeat the success of microsoft (in terms of market share). It was not just an idea plus execution. It was mostly about being in right place in right time.