Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If it's too geeky, it will never take off. It needs to be trendy and sassy, whether you like it or not. The "if we build it they will come" approach may shoot this thing in the foot.
On another note, are we putting data in control of the "user" or their "isp"?
This feels like the Kazaa or Napster of social networking, which can so easily be shut down by ISPs.
Lastly, people use Facebook at work and at home, and they log onto it from their friend's houses, their phones, etc. If it's all on my "node" at home, do I have to leave my stuff running all the time? That's not very convenient or green. And I don't want my bandwidth at home being eaten up every time my friends want to look at my vacation photos.
Anyway, kudos for the ambition, but the idea needs more time.
What you really want is a central repository where your encrypted data can be uploaded to and only decrypted by those you choose (not the host itself).
I assure you the mechanics of how the data is stored is not of interest to 99% of people. Nobody really understands encryption anyway. Or is this site exclusively for geeks?
Obviously, no security is perfect, and given sufficiently evil central repository you'd still end up a situation of mistrust. But rather than take a chance with my private information simply because the people holding it tell me they aren't evil, I'll take responsibility for my own data and do my best as a user to make the right choices about how to treat that which I desire to keep private. If that means being picky about what I share/post, that's fine. If that means I need to run my own host and control access myself, well that's the burden I can choose to take to give me the peace of mind I'm looking for.
Additionally, if done right, the users do not need to know a whiff about encryption. I'll point to "https:// as a more successful example.
(Though HTTPS isn't exactly an unqualified success. Most people don't understand what it protects or notice when it isn't there.)
surely there is a great market share for ubiquitous encryption.
This way, the FB-alternative becomes a voice in the free market for respecting privacy.
With luck, what they will be able to do by the end of the summer is build version 0.01 of core social network codebase and gain enough interest from open source developers for the project to keep rolling. With luck, over time the project will develop to the point that real social networks for casual people will be built upon it. With luck, those will gain traction.
These guys want to build Linux 0.01, you want "Linux On The Desktop". Not saying it is implausible, just quite different stages of product development.
Clearly someone's worried about the integrity of their filesystem.
I'll bet you they will get more out of this than diaspora in the long run.
There is an interesting Jewish sub-theme to all this, Diaspora being obviously a term with a strong connection to the Jewish faith, most or all of these four are from Jewish heritage and Zuckerberg himself is too.
I think their Jewish background is what caused them to pick it, not because they relate it to African, Greek or Irish events.
Also, the allusion is more recognizable in the niche of early adopters they need to court for traction. That's a signal that they'll be less mass-market (connotations: more hip, less tacky) than FB has become recently.
A large number of people leaving their 'home'.
I've seen worse metaphors.
What the average person wants is functionality, not some enhanced privacy. To succeed they'll need to offer enhanced functionality.
The only thing that is a threat to Facebook is something that causes them to start hemorrhaging users. But face it, when the average person logs in to Facebook they have new stuff to look at it and people to communicate with. But if they signup and login to Diaspora, there just won't be as much activity, if any. So the average person will go back to Facebook, and stay there, until all of his/her friends move to Diaspora. But they won't, for the same reason. It's just not going to happen unless there is some fundamental change.
The reason Facebook gained users so fast was because they generated incredible amount of buzz by making it exclusive and lauching it at Harvard. If I were diaspora, I would follow the exact same launch plan. However, from what they're saying it sounds like this won't be the plan.
So when they launch they'll have a bunch of hacker types come signup and check it out, and they'll possibly even invite their friends. And a few friends may even join. But those friends (normals) will go back to Facebook simply because there's more stuff to look at and more people to talk with. And that will be the end.
I can see political communities moving to Diaspora, I can see technical communities gravitating/dual use with twitter... No, it will probably never be as big as either, but that doesn't mean it won't fill a niche.
As for having both, personally, I'm looking for a way to not use Facebook at all and still get the benefits. Right now I just don't use my Facebook account. Having Diaspora would be a small improvement, but if it's a lukewarm thing, my friends will be more active on Facebook, and won't be that active on Diaspora.
Maybe there'll be a Diaspora app for Facebook, ha. I'm not familiar with Facebook, is there a way to do this without giving Facebook all the data you were trying to hide from it in the first place?
Actually, another thing I just thought of. If we could get people to just create the Diaspora accounts, and just connect it to their Twitter, Flickr, and so on, it may be enough. The updates will happen automatically. I'll still be able to browse my friends' pages, which will be updated without them thinking about it.
I hope these guys make it, but the smell of hype needs to dissipate quickly.
Cute that they got the touch / grep / mount / fsck fsck fsck joke in there on the chalk board.
Selfish motives provide the greatest motivation. At least, they are working on it for the right reasons.
There's no fun in a "relatively secure, virus-free platform", but that doesn't stop Apple from billing their OS as such.
My guess is that most Facebook users aren't aware of, or perhaps not interested in, the privacy issues that discussed by people like the ones here at HN.
I don't think the average person will care unless there is some widely publicized abuse of private information by Facebook. Until then, everyone probably will just see these issues as hypothetical.
Most, if not all, of those services have seen a brief flurry of activity before eventually withering and dying. People don't truly care about privacy -- they like the idea of their privacy being important, in theory. No combination of new features, openness, or distributed systems is going to be able to overcome the fact that people largely only care about two things when it comes to social networking: being on the network that the most of their friends are on, and having their stuff seen by the most amount of people possible.
If you ask, people will tell you until they're breathless that privacy is important to them -- but almost no one will ever touch the robust privacy controls they asked for.
What seems to be the case is that people are largely unaware what kind of data collection mechanisms are in place.
There is a growing concern, and it is not just facebook, it is very distressing to people when they find that their gmail\yahoo\whatever has been hacked and "they" ware sending Viagra ads to all their friends and colleagues.
I often meet people burned in such manner, and their attitude about online security changed dramatically, often without guidance they do not know how to approach the problem.
In addition the interface always gives a sense of security by abstracting your communication with other people.
There is a great market potential for a private by default.
And 20 days left to go. What are these nerds going to do with all this money? Deluxe Ramen I suppose.
Let's hope they don't screw up, if they do this right then it just might be that start-ups have a viable new route to find funding very quickly.
If they do mess up this high profile case will ruin the future for a lot of others, everybody will point to them and say 'remember diaspora'.
Having said that, now that they're raised a lot of cash in a short period of time, they have a responsibility to account for how it's being spent. What are the project milestones? What are they committing to release, based on their current budget? Where is the money going? What kind of availability do they have to work on this beyond the summer? What is their plan for when they run out of money?
They've attracted a lot of eyeballs and dollars because people decided to vote out of spite against Facebook with their wallets, and not because of careful due diligence of Diaspora's plan. The stakes are high and a lot of people will expect to see results before the year is over. These four are going to have a lot of Google juice associated with their names for years to come, so they better know what they're getting themselves into.
I don't think people are upset that there is a single entity holding everyone's data (I mean look at Google and Yahoo, they certainly have a similar amount of information if not more) -- they're upset about the way the data is handled. Slowly eroding privacy standards, weirdly-automatic linking with external sites.
I bet 90% of Facebook's troubles would go away if they came up with an elegant way for a normal person to set privacy settings and then promise to not change them while at the same time offering opt-in on all future changes rather than opt-out. It's probably too late for Facebook, but maybe not for a clone.
Then privacy can be a feature and not their raison d'être.
It also isn't too late to change the name.
For now they're kids with good intentions that have landed a 'live one', let's see if they can run with it and have the stamina required for something like this.
10 years ago I would have been much quicker to jump in but I've learned the hard way to be a bit more wary.
An appliance, to be really reliable, needs to automatically store it's data somewhere else...like, say, a central backup service run by the company that sold the device. Oh, but now a central company has all your private data. Oops.
It becomes a case of who do you trust more, your family and friends - or a company somewhere. Besides, your mostly only storing information you want shared with family and friends anyway - otherwise why are you putting your info on this device in the first place?
edit: if I wasn't clear, the backup would be an automated thing. Only backing up information on peoples devices who are allowed to see it anyway.
Instead, the One Social Web guys [http://onesocialweb.org] are developing an open source decentralized XMPP based social network that works and is based on solid standards. And you can go, grab the code and try it right now. But they don't appear in the mainstream media...
IMHO, instead of raise money and start looking at their own bellybutton they should join efforts with other initiatives and go for something bigger.
you can put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig
all the same, I wish them luck, why?, because it's not facebook...