Diaspora team takes on Eben Moglen as informal advisor | Hacker News Reader

Diaspora team takes on Eben Moglen as informal advisor

wired.com

9 pointsjacquesm6 comments

"Laurent Eschenauer, one of the OneSocialWeb developers, says his project and Diaspora share the goal of providing a “free, open and decentralized alternative to the social networking silos that are Facebook and Twitter.” He says he hopes that Diaspora looks to work cooperatively with his project, rather than “reinventing the wheel."

...

"Both OneSocialWeb and Appleseed share the same problem: getting enough users to make users want to sign up — the so-called network effect where a network gets exponentially more useful as it gets bigger. (Think of the fax machine as an example — two fax machines in the world aren’t very useful, but your fax machine becomes much more useful when there are 1,000 of them, and even more valuable when there are 10 million.)"

...

"Users don’t have to choose to stop using Facebook or Twitter and will be able use the Diaspora client to use those all those services in one place — much like Friendfeed currently does. But when Diaspora knows that the person you are trying to communicate with also has Diaspora, it will use peer-to-peer, encrypted methods to send that message. And as more and more people start using the free software, they’ll slowly find themselves weaned from for-profit services, according to Moglen."

I think if the various social networks coming up interoperated, on some significant set of features, it would be good for all of them and all of us.

If service A has Ua users then the value of A is Ua^2 (or whatever). If B has Ub its value is Ub^2. If they interoperate then the value of both approach (Ua+Ub)^2. E.g. 3^2 = 9 and 4^2 = 16, or (3+4)^2 = 49. As service A adds users, services A and B both enjoy an increase in the value of their networks.

Edit: math notation.

I have long doubted the validity of this "Metcalfe's Law", which "states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2)". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

Generally the people in your social group is much more likely to belong to the same telecommunication system as you do. And you don't care nearly as much otherwise. Someone in Nepal will care a lot less when Facebook gains 100,000 more users in Italy than when those new users are in Nepal itself.

We can make a much better approximation of the real usefulness of the network by individualizing the law to each user, i.e. "...the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2) in your relevant social group."

Notice that since an individual has "cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships", this modified law also place a much sharper limit on a network's usefulness by Dunbar's number. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

Totally agree. People always seem to forget how simple people are.

Is there some principle that states that the value of a social network is the square of the user base? Some networks have a business model predicated on keeping their head count limited.

Yes, it's a rule of thumb called called "Tillys anything but a law" as discussed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1319054

The idea is that a network is more valuable the more connections there are in the network. Think of the difference between two new people added to the end of a line connected front to back, and two new people added by connecting them to everyone already there, who are also connected all to each other. The latter is more like a social network than the former.

Near the bottom of the article: "Diaspora is taking a different tack, according to Moglen, who has taken the students on as clients and is informally advising them."

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