Diaspora pledges have just crossed the $50,000 mark
kickstarter.com
kickstarter.com
The first problem I have is that this is entirely too much money. This is an open-source project. The idea is not for them to take a salary. They really just need money for living expenses for the summer.
Second, I don't see any seasoned mentors in the picture. Not to be crass but I think young people are silly (I am a young person and I am no exception.) I think the money is overscoped and the time is underscoped. I can see a lot of that money being wasted. Prove me wrong guys.
Third, since this is not the typical investor/entrepreneur relationship, the incentives are much different. This is not a loan, where they will feel super motivated to deliver because if they don't they will lose money. This is not an equity investment where an investor puts in money and has a say on the direction of the project. This is basically a really big grant(1) from 1,573 people who trust them with their money based on a 5 minute video. If they fail, who do they have to answer to(2)? They can always just say, "hey, we are four students who bit off more than we can chew." I think they will deliver something but I am not writing "social networking revolution" into my calendar for September 2010 at this point.
I am totally happy for them, and happy that someone is doing this, but I am also skeptical that the final result will be anything revolutionary.
1 Regarding the donation structure: "Projects must comply with Amazon Payments' Acceptable Use Policy. Among Amazon's restrictions:
*Loans, investment, and any kind of financial return are forbidden
*Lotteries, raffles, and sweepstakes are not allowed" taken from http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines
re: 2: that's the worrying bit. But there is nothing lost by trying, we'll all learn from this.
If they fail, then we can analyze why they failed. If they succeed there will be a lot of attempts to copy this success. There already will be I believe.
Something new is happening here, crowdsourced funding on a relatively significant scale.
And I think you could safely add a 0 to your estimate of how much money they'll end up with, which will give them several things: Investors will see the concept as 'validated' by the target audience before they've even written a single line of code. And big name companies with resources and experience will fall over each other by next Friday to have their name associated with this effort.
If they're smart they sell their skins dear and get a reputable investor on board for the expertise they miss and the networking factor.
The excess money will give them runway and extra clout during negotiations.
The skeptic inside me says, who the hell are these guys anyway? And how do I know they will act responsibly? And even if they attempt to act responsibly how do we know anything will come of it in a sub-optimal situation (sub-optimal in my point of view because they have little experience, no mentors, and don't have to answer to anyone. I don't think a great amount of experience is necessary but when combined with the other two it just doesn't look good.)
Also, it just seems like this system is ripe for abuse. If I just want 50,000 bucks it seems like I can use Kickstarter to mobilize people around some fake or inflated cause, do little to no work, and pocket the money.
No offense to Kickstarter, I participated in "New York Makes a Book"!
[EDIT] Also, I agree with pretty much everything you said. All of that can and will happen in the best case scenario, but how likely is it?
Hopefully they'll pick something like YC for their source of knowledge. Or they might crowd source that too, no telling. Already people are offering them fat pipes, infrastructure expertise and so on.
They're currently pulling in $3500 per hour, it is accelerating rather than slowing down. If they hit a feedback loop (if that isn't already happening) this will be the start-up story of the year. By some measures it already is.
edit: they just picked up another $2K donation, $55,429 now, that's a 10% increase in about an hour and half.
The harm will be if they fail. Even if they ship something in the next 6 months I'll be really impressed.
Currently they are at $82,690 for 1945 backers which is $42.51 each, does anyone really care if it doesn't work out? Before you answer think about people spending $499 on an iPad, a device they don't need and might not even work on their WiFi [I'll be buying one anyway].
Also, don't forget that each of the donations is essentially a pre-payment for some part of the service if it succeeds.
Those who use this model can avoid securities law problems by using a donor model, which is fine in itself.
Traditional donations, however, are made to charities and similar 501(c)(3) organizations that are bound by pretty strict rules and by fiduciary duties which, among other things, require that: (1) all assets must be permanently dedicated to the charitable purpose; (2) those who manage the charity cannot misdirect assets for their personal profit or pay themselves inflated salaries that amount to misappropriation; (3) those who manage are bound by fiduciary duties to do so consistent with the purposes of the organization and face severe penalties for violating such fiduciary duties; and (4) those who manage must render a strict financial accounting for their activities and make their books and records available for appropriate inspection to assure integrity.
No such safeguards are built into crowd funding, as the system really depends on a "trust me" attitude. This may be fine in any given project if the founders have the talent, vision, and integrity to comport themselves consistently with the trust placed in them to do what they say they will do when they solicit the donations. If they do not have integrity, however, I am not sure what remedies might exist if they should prove less than scrupulous in dealing with the donated funds.
This is a pretty new area and I'm not very familiar with it. But it would appear on the surface that there is not much that can be done if founders in such situations choose to abuse the trust reposed in them by the donors. Given this problem, I don't see how this model can easily be replicated across a meaningful spectrum of situations, even though it might work for select high profile cases.
We bought one, I think it was $700 for a lifetime of no monthly fees and transaction fees pegged at 1%.
I have no idea why people are donating money to this. Might as well flush it down your toilet.
P.S. I'm not trying to piss people off here, I'd honestly like to hear someone explain to me why this is worth even $1.
Much better cost wise too, friends can pool for a node and take on a bunch of excess from poor countries or so. Or use locality effects to keep things near each other on the same box because of the bigger chance of them being connected.
Nothing a week long hashing out session won't solve before they start laying bricks.
So it would look like facebook but no central company stores the data.
That's how I would try to put it together. That way the local neighbourhood nerds can bask in the glory of being a 'node' (give them a sticker to put on their front door or something, 'diaspora lives here'), and the bike(r) dudes are not going to have to learn anything they didn't already know how to do on fb.
Put the domain and any centralized resources in a foundation to make sure it can't be hijacked by someone that suddenly decides to go 'evil'.
edit: hello dear downvoter, please elaborate on your vote.
It's worth at least $5 or even $10 dollars to me. That's effectively, "I'll buy you guys a pizza." (Or, here in NYC, a couple or three slices of pizza. But it's good pizza, damn it.) I'm not especially worried about whether or not this project conquers the world, or beats Facebook (which I could care less about one way or the other). The motivation here is just some interesting people with a lot of passion doing something they care about. Giving them a little money is like buying a beer for someone in a bar you just met who is telling a great story. It's not really goal oriented, just sociable. (And that's the difference between this and flushing money down the toilet.)
The larger result relies on the magic of lots and lots of individually small donations. A small amount of money like this doesn't hurt me at all, but a whole big lot of donations like this add up to $50,000 in a hurry apparently.
325 in the $5 to $10 range
274 $10 - $25
104 $50 - $100
76 $100 to $350
8 $350 to $1000
3 $1000 to $2000
1 $2000 and up
That's certainly a lot of people buying them a pizza, but there is also a significant number of people buying them 10 DVDs or a four course meal for two, and even a few are buying them a months rent.
This seems like a niche for social networking, rather than a alternative to FB.
Social networks works because they are up and running 24/7. If the data is on my computer how will others access it if I turn off my computer ?
If you ask me, they are doing a great viral buzzing money funding. This is like the 5th post I see on the web less than two hours about this.
This won't go anywhere, even most of the people in this tech community won't use it, let alone someone like my girlfriend.
We get it, facebook is going too far, but this isn't the answer
If they're half decent developers, they could, without blinking, get a job at $72K/year, which means, they are taking a 50% pay cut to do something interesting and useful, and perhaps educational, while simultaneously voicing the pain we all fell about the direction Facebook is going.
I sent them $25 (or, at least, pledged it to kickstarter) because I applaud anybody who goes to the effort to do something like this. I sent Firefox $25 to get their NYT advertisement.
These all seem like useful diversions of money, not sure what's up with the detractors - You think the developers at RedHat/Novell/IBM aren't taking a (much larger) salary to work on Open Source projects?
There is no doubt that what they are doing is good and in the spirit of the hacker ethic. I think what they are doing is great. To me it seems like they are getting too much money and I have my doubts about what the final result will be...
if they'd keep their code open throughout the process, then people can push them code and help them out, and then we'd end up with a product that the community could stand behind, and ensure that it is portable, and release it as a stand alone program with all the goodness that it needs -- firewall tunneling, being a cross platform easy to deploy app, being fast, whatever
If you were to push a feature to them instead of donating 25$ to their 'project', we'd all be a lot better off, and much much closer to our goal, then buying a group of four undergrads from nyu a slice of pizza
screw facebook, screw VCs and summer jobs and internships and loan officers and grumpy old techies
freenet 2.0
More dicussion here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1342655
The comments on the kickstarter site are quite interesting to read, the mix in gender is relatively balanced and it does not seem to be a 'techie' crowd at all.
Just lots of people that wish these kids luck and don't mind throwing some money on the table for them to go and play with.
I really wonder how high it will go, they're in a feedback loop now, more $ means more press which in turn means more $.
But I wish the diaspora developers well, and hope that they deliver something which is at least a foundation for a privacy respecting social network in future. Clearly there is a need for some software filling this role, and enough people are fed up with the status quo to put money towards a solution.
1) Put up ideas. 2) Raise money for them. 3) Have people apply to try to execute them.
Not that I have anything against these four kids, but I imagine this idea could be executed better by a different set of people. For example, as most of the HN community news knows, four co-founders is a lot and usually not optimal.
I wonder if there are other sites this would work for - ones that have huge userbases, with a big enough proportion of them being very dissatisfied?
Throwing $10 or $50 on the table for a bunch of strangers out of frustration is probably quicker done than out of interest for a good but unproven idea.
If linux hadn't happened someone could go and suggest to rewrite windows in 3 months if $10,000,000 is pledged.
There must be other sources of frustration on the web.
Diaspora == Facetella?
Ultimately, one of the biggest winners there was the closed-source but relatively efficient and enforcement-resistant Kazaa, from the Skype founders. But open-protocol (Gnutella) and open-source (LimeWire) options also did alright.
Today, Skype as an again-independent company could be a dark horse candidate for a decentralized, enhanced-privacy but closed-code Facebook-competitor.
I'm not donating a dollar until they have something to show.
These people are getting obscene amounts of money that
a)a very small proportion of web is going to use
b)is going to be built by 4 guys who presumably can live off there computers but can now afford there own office space or something and live like kings.
Also, if you compare the ~$90k they've raised so far with some recently VC funded social media startups, all of a sudden it won't seem "obscene"- in fact it seems positively lean and scrappy.
I admit the over exaggeration on the "living like a king" part but I fail to see any analogy with VC funded social startups and this