Yishan Wong, Worked at Facebook from 2005-2010.
"As it stands, based on available technical and product details, Diaspora is the dumbest idea since OpenID.
Whereas OpenID absurdly required you to login using a URL (luckily no longer a requirement) in order to preserve your privacy, which no one really cares about, Diaspora apparently requires you to run your own set of web hosting services in preserve your privacy, which no one really cares about.
However, there are a sizable number of people who think they care about privacy, so there is a market for Diaspora.
The main problems with Diaspora being a successful parallel social network are: Most women will not use it. See reason #1.
Instead, I will describe a product formulation for Diaspora that I believe could be successful and achieve reasonable user adoption, by exploiting interoperability with Facebook while providing user-driven privacy controls. Diaspora guys, are you listening?
First, dispense with the personal hosting solution. This is a non-starter out of the gate. Anyone who is willing to run their own hosting solution (virtual or not) should just erase the personal details from their Facebook account, put their content on a personal webpage, and list the address for the webpage on Facebook. In fact, that's exactly what the web was in 1999.
Rather, this is how you do it for Diaspora. There are two key ideas:
People are unwilling to share personal information according to Facebook's defaults, but there is nothing preventing them from having an "empty" Facebook account populated with none of this personal information. Facebook does not (and cannot, physically) pull information from user accounts on third-party applications. Facebook can do what it will with information entered by users into its website, but information stored by third-party applications can't be taken and used by Facebook. (Technically, Facebook may cache this data in intermediate formats when it is rendered, but they would have to be really deliberately evil to be intercepting this data and using it)
Therefore, what Diaspora should do is become a Facebook Connect app. The irony here is delicious - users who wish to use Diaspora as a "privacy-oriented" Facebook will then do the following: Delete all their personal information on Facebook except for their name and perhaps an innocuous profile pic. Use Diaspora to provide all other core Facebook-style services, including the profile info fields.
Then, Diaspora renders itself either as canvas page or a profile tab, and displays the user's profile info for the user when other Facebook users browse to that user's page.
What this does is it places all of the user's personal information on Diaspora servers, which Facebook can then no longer access and send to third parties. Access control is provided by Diaspora (rendering of the profile tab or canvas pages can be controlled depending on who is viewing it). Users can still interoperate with other Facebook users, so they don't need to migrate their social graph, which is the greatest hurdle to Diaspora's adoption.
Diaspora can then offer users the options to store their information in an encrypted format (accessing this smoothly on behalf of friended users will make the product somewhat more complex, but I think it can be done by delegating keys properly), and make available the application code for inspection. They will still have to trust Diaspora's hosting to be running the same code, but I will describe a way to handle that.
Diaspora can open-source the code and allow other Diaspora installations to be set up, in case users don't trust Diaspora itself - a particular group of real-life friends who mutually trust each other can just host their own Diaspora installation and store their own information there. They will need to create a new app on Facebook but that's pretty okay - it will become known as a "Diaspora-style" profile if it ever becomes widespread. People will even be able to keep accounts on multiple Diaspora services, for the purposes of segregating their data, if they wish. The codebases for these services will also inevitably evolve and advance.
Interestingly, Diaspora does not necessarily need to provide photo hosting, events, groups, and other core Facebook services (but it can). Users can already exploit this property of Facebook not being able to access third-party data by using other photo hosting applications that they trust, and the same goes for all other applications. In fact, this is true today. The irony is remarkable, because much of the privacy worries center around how third-party sites can now access user data, but by flipping this around and placing the user data securely on a third-party site that makes itself a Facebook application, Facebook cannot access that data and thus give it to any other third parties. This is even the case when these third-party sites use Facebook Connect for their authentication, because it still only credentials the site to access Facebook data via API calls; it doesn't give Facebook the ability to pull stuff off of a third-party app's database or anything - the app itself is in control.
What is more, users can select the amount of privacy they want to personally protect. To transition, a user doesn't actually have to delete all their profile data off of Facebook (say you don't care if Facebook shares your hometown with the world, but you do care about your relationship status) - deleting all your Facebook data can be laborious. The user just deletes the fields they want to make more private, and transitions only that data on to a Diaspora service. It can then be managed with whatever higher-granularity and/or opt-in access controls provided by that service; the remaining data on Facebook that the user doesn't care as much about can remain under Facebook's dominion.
By allowing open-source clone services, every "clique" of users only has to rely on the local nerd to set up an installation, and all of the users in that clique will be able to migrate some or all of their data from Facebook onto their Diaspora service, and continue using Facebook without having to migrate their social graph.
Lastly, based on my understanding of the views and temperaments of Facebook's executives (including Mark Zuckerberg), they wouldn't ban this app and would in fact tend to look rather favorably on it, if with a bit of initial chagrin."