Diaspora: An Overdue Update
joindiaspora.com
joindiaspora.com
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org
I think by the time Sep 15th rolls around, Appleseed will be on it's fourth release this summer.
So when they "open to public": 1. who's going to notice? 2. with the current user-friendliness, who's going to care?
But in any case, they give out invites like water, you just have to email invite@appleseedproject.org. Since that's the beta testing site, they're looking for beta testers, not casual users.
Diaspora does have publicity on it's side, I'll give it that. We'll see how user-friendly it's first release is in September.
(yeah - I know that's not as true nowadays as it was at the beginning of y2k, but I'm trying to make a point here...)
I've always thought the distributed social site concept had room for both those people who want to run things themselves and for service providers. Kind of like wordpress.
It's possible that in a couple of months Diaspora will look a lot less like a Great White Hope. We will see.
That said, I'll only use Diaspora for myself, but that's based on personal preference.
I know Ruby like the back of my hand and am comfortable with Rails. Also, my site's built in Rails, so Diaspora will probably integrate nicely.
In other words, it's software for anyone who wants to run their own facebook-like site. Except that all the sites running it connect to each other.
Once it's out of beta, most users will just go to a sign up page of any number of nodes out there (I think there's like 50 out there already? I'm not sure)
Typical facebook users are not early adopters. None of these projects are even close to targeting typical facebook users yet.
I really can't say that Diaspora has been doing that better. Or at all.
The real problems with all this stuff is conceptualizing exactly how distributed social networking system should work is actually a really hard problem. I would like to see a description of what the best solution is. That is more important than some set of code that supposedly solves the problem according to someone's concept, which they don't or can't explain.
I mean, for Diaspora or Appleseed or any similar effort to work, they have to have a network effect. And this involves, besides having it work, telling people why they should use it, why they should run servers with it, and why it will work.
Except possibly OneSocialWeb, which extends XMPP. Is that the project you find most intriguing?
I've seen BASIC used to power million dollar companies.
To throw out some project simply because it is built in a language you don't like is counter-productive. I know PHP is the language to hate around here but you could do a lot worse in a web environment.
PHP really is the new 'BASIC', it has a very low barrier to get started and that's why plenty of people associate it with crummy code but you don't have to write crummy code in any language.
http://svn.appleseedproject.org/trunk/_documentation/quickso...
From the source, it looks like they're building abstracted PHP libraries, too. And it's an event/hook architecture, so you can pop this protocol out and put another one in, theoretically.
I don't know if this is a placeholder protocol while they build the software, or if this is what they plan on using and evolving.
Look at the list of apps that simplescripts supports[1], most of them are PHP (and simplescript in-turn is supported by a lot of hosts).
Look at OpenSourceCRM - most of the applications there are PHP[2]. The most popular open source CRM applications are also written in PHP[3]
PHP makes up a significant portion of self-install web apps because it is so widely supported[4] (LAMP), it easy to setup and a lot of sysadmins and designers understand how the apps work.
I commented when Diaspora was announced that for these reasons, and because of the target market, PHP would have been a better choice. They could have slipstreamed the install on top of the already large install base of these other applications without admins and potential users having to purchase or setup additional servers (ie. if you already have Wordpress installed somewhere, installing a PHP Diaspora would be a cinch. It could even read and setup using WP or other config files).
You may not like PHP (I don't know anybody who likes it from a design perspective), but you would be a fool to ignore it.
[1] http://www.simplescripts.com/script_list
[2] http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/search.php
[3] http://www.insidecrm.com/features/top-open-source-solutions-...
Not only is it in a language that many hackers dislike, but it's a supposedly decentralized social app in a centralized (and, in this context, archaic) SVN repo.
Today, DVCS is essentially the foundation of developer social networks, both formally (github, bitbucket) and informally. How are you going to make a supposedly decentralized open source social network when the foundation isn't decentralized? Mom doesn't care right now whether a social network is decentralized and open source, developers do.
What risk do you perceive?
At the end of the day, the hip new app with the latest fashionable framework might still send your plaintext password over HTTP.
I'm sure you'll see a lot of different protocol support in the future.
We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th.
I don't know if everyone knew that already, but it was news to me.
Some things can be put together with enough all nighters.
But my hunch is a working distributed social networking system isn't one of them. And the reason is that, like operating systems, databases or sophisticated languages, you can't iteratively improve a badly designed complex system (and working with similar things, I've tried...).
You especially can't do it at 3:00am.
(And unless you've first debugged your design, the chances are your design is bad. Unlike, operating systems, databases or sophisticated languages, there aren't well known patterns for constructed distributed social networking sites... but the problems involved seem at least as hard)
Especially when considering that these are being developed by professionals with industry experience, and Diaspora is four college kids.
We all want to hear the story of the intrepid engineers working in their parents garage and changing the world, but let's be realistic here.
I said they may have it working since they last talked about it. That's all.
What does "working" mean if it doesn't mean working well?
My point earlier was that, as opposed to a fairly linear application like a web app, in something like an operating system or a distributed database, there's much greater gulf between being able to make a demo that looks interesting and getting the system even barely usable.
The problem is interlocked complexity. In a linear app, you can add code to take of cases you didn't think of. In a complex system, such changes can result in creating further bugs.
If Diaspora folks just start adding more code to make their app not crash under demo conditions, it won't solve whatever architecture problems they have. And the point is that this is an design/architecture/protocol problem, a hard one. Perhaps they've solved that problem and are just putting the finishing touches on the resulting code. But a glance at their video does not give me that impression. It's more "uh, we're putting out what we got ... we can keep working..."
It's like P/NP proofs. If you don't start with summary of earlier efforts, saying why your stuff works when the other stuff didn't, it probably means you just haven't grokked just how hard the problem is.
sumeetjain quoted: "We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th."
Then "what" said they didn't have it working yet according to a video posted a little while ago.
I said that it might be working now because it's been over a week, assuming they're pulling long hours to make it work.
So, I guess the definition of "working" really depends on what the Diaspora team meant when they said it was working and they liked it (in this context).
We're always delighted to receive feedback!
Embrace, extend and ...
However, there's no denying how awesome it is that a few college kids can raise over $100,000 like this to build their project.
Even if the project fails like most people say, I imagine it will be a positive experience for the four guys that worked on it.
I figure it will be a huge hit among geeks like us, but then will fall out of usage due to the lack of updates from people that matter, like friends and family.
I use Facebook for staying in touch with the mostly non-technical people in my life who actually use Facebook, and that's what will end up swaying most users (like myself) back towards Facebook in a relatively short period of time.
You won't switch if you don't have anyone to talk to on it, and you won't have anyone to talk to on it if you don't switch.
Google Talk and its Gmail integration did wonders for Jabber, thankfully.
I take recommendations I give to people very seriously, and I simply wouldn't recommend to any non-technical person to move away from Facebook to a platform that has none/few of their friends on it.
It's easier to realize a vision when you've already got something concrete to point to. Otherwise you often waste time arguing over what color to paint the shed.
SELECT * FROM user_preferences; -- type thing
I had a really good look at that and I did not like much what I saw (that was a while ago, but still). Do you have a specific reason for suggesting that over appleseed (mentioned elsewhere in this thread), which I think would be a far better fit?
UX should be the first dollars spent on a consumer product, not the last.
It means they have a clear idea of what they can do, and more importantly about what they can't do. So blowing some money on an expert in a field for which they don't have expertise is actually a really good sign.
Also, there's got to be a better way of connecting people of similar interests via groups than the current model.
Also also, please consider musicians in the melée!!
god speed diaspora. I for one will be joining asap.
That you think of sans-serif as more objective is actually quite funny. Newspapers, books and magazines – i.e. pretty much everything we read until a few years ago – used nearly exclusively a serif font for all their body text. Now it’s serif that sticks out.