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Comment by ukdm | Hacker News Reader

If you want to create a Facebook replacement you at least need a name you can't spell wrong easily. Diaspora is not such a name, and there are several ways of spelling it and it still sounds right, for example:

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"

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google googol googel googil...

Do we have to optimize everything for those of limited literacy or vocabulary? I hope not.

You do realize 'Google' is a corruption of 'googol', right? :)

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.

>You do realize 'Google' is a corruption of 'googol', right? :)

... 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.

I do, and I was enough of a nerd to appreciate the inference when they first launched, too :)

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.

Hehheh :)

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".

Any data to support this? I've always been skeptical this mattered much. Google does a good job guiding people past spelling mistakes for popular services.

Nope, no data. But I'd rather own "super.com" than "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.com"! :)

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.

I actually think 'Diaspora' is a great name, and their spelling of it is the most straightforward one, so that once you see it, you can't really get it wrong again (this doesn't apply to many web company names).

This is definitely a developers' project for developers. I'd imagine the paid hosting (as Wordpress.com is to Wordpress) version would have a major branding re-think, and I wouldn't be surprised if many others used the Diaspora source to created better-branded hosted free versions, to try and convert the masses to.

Smart phishers should probably start building Google juice for "diaspora login", "dispora login", "dieaspora login", etc

Honestly, this comment boggles my mind. Diaspora is a perfectly normal word describing what they are trying to do perfectly ; I doubt many people would have trouble spelling it or looking it up on Google.

You are reminding me of the day I spent 5 solid minutes looking at the word "tonido" trying to work out on my own how to say it.

I think the name is kinda cuil.

You also need a name that has some common usage. I have a decent vocabulary, but I did not know this word. Frankly, it sounds like a condition that might have one sitting on the toilet half the day. Just my $0.02

You should read more.

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