And lots of people with money to back it up.
To facebook, you just jumped the shark. Perhaps you will never die, but your days are counted as king of the social web.
They're by no means a contender right now in the eyes of the tech world, but if I were Zuckerberg I'd take notice of what happens when you fuck people over often enough and what kind of grass roots resistance can materialize out of thin air.
There seems to be a limit to consumer patience when it comes to things like this and that makes me happy.
All FB has to do to take the wind out of diaspora's sails is to announce they got the message and that they'll default all privacy settings to 'opt-in' from now on and apologize.
I doubt that will happen though.
No.
If Facebook was 2, 10, or 100 top-caliber Google engineers away from a serious challenge, Google would already be seriously challenging Facebook. Google is a CS-hiring force of nature.
I think facebook, for the next couple of years is unassailable, but they should definitely take note.
The facebook brand has been damaged in the last couple of weeks, and the hype around diaspora is damaging it further.
That's the only way in which this will have effect. If they pull it off though (even if they just ship) I'll tip my hat to them.
They are going to get more 'legs' is not the same as being big. The only thing that I try to convey there is that if they would get a couple of high profile people on board is that the project will gain a lot of legitimacy in the eyes of the the press and the blogs and that will give them yet another round of exposure.
I did not at all mean to imply that they would be 'big' because of that, there are far too many factors against them to even give them a fighting chance. If they play all their cards right they might be a niche player, if there is some kind of act-of-god then they might get a lot bigger. But taking on facebook at this stage is like taking on google or microsoft.
Diaspora is meant to be a mean of decentralization, just like Wordpress. Google is a mean of centralization, just like Facebook. Diaspora founders would love to see the ubiquity of Sheeva plugs (or whatever cheap home server we could get). Google would hate it: that would mean the death of most of their online services. Only the fundamentally centralized ones, like search, would be left. Gmail, Blogger, YouTube… would mostly die. (I'm aware of the asymmetric bandwidth issue. But if Sheeva plugs are ubiquitous, bandwidth will be symmetric anyway.)
I would still give them the finger, I don't trust Mark to keep it that way.
I'll admit the likelyhood of them succeeding in dethroning Facebook could probably be measured with several zeroes after a decimal point, but I don't believe that has anything to do with their personalities. Mabe I'm naive?
They're about to become the #1 website. They have issues, mostly PR problems at this stage, but for every person that has left FB in the last couple of months a much larger number has signed up.