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Comment by benlangfeld | Hacker News Reader

I'm really disappointed to see that the team has decided that instead of learning about an existing standard (XMPP) which fits the purpose perfectly, they've decided to begin defining their own protocol, which will go down the same path but with less rigour and a whole lot of wasted time. Eventually it will have to be trashed in favour of something more robust.

If that's what they've spent the last three months working on, they've had some bad advice. I thought Pivotal were all about "just get the damn thing done" and so would have encouraged them not to waste their time.

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We are indeed all about being pragmatic. I think a lot of our pragmatism has rubbed off on the Diaspora folks, but do keep in mind that we're not really advising them in any formal capacity. (Other than the occasional conversation over breakfast, or when they ask about ideas.) I'm sure if you asked them about their choices, they'd be very happy to take in new ideas. Not to speak for them, but I think they're just trying to get a concept out and iterate on it. I think Ship it Squirrel would approve.

I've posted to the diaspora-dev list pointing to this comment, so hopefully one of the Diaspora guys will take a look at this soon.

I'll also follow up shortly with a blog post with more details about how this might be implemented atop a well defined set of standards and the benefits of doing so vs re-inventing the wheel.

i really wonder how long the "community" is going to humour these developers. it's really about time we realize that a bunch of people got tricked into giving some students a bunch of money to hack on a fun project over the summer because they were led to believe that it would be something more than it ever was going to be. they failed to produce anything useful, or even a good starting point for a larger project. they have made poor decisions, have been far-from-transparent, and i don't see how anyone in their right mind would want to hop on board and commit a bunch of their time to this project.

is it just the publicity? how long can everyone ride that, and why would anyone with a clue think that's a worthwhile endeavour.

i've read through the developer mailing list and it's a bunch of arguments that essentially boil down to opinions about what this project "should be", and technical discussions by admitted non-experts about topics that are extremely fundamental to the success of this project. with 200K, and a boatload of exposure, they could have spent the summer consulting with experts, planning a viable solution. but they didn't (nor did they ever imply that they would, so no surprise here). i don't mean to sound elitist, but a viable global social networking platform should probably be designed by experts.

i'm not trolling, i'm hoping that people will read this and go "oh yeah, maybe my time could be better spent on other projects", instead of blazing onwards without looking at the big picture.

They actually explicitly dismissed XMPP (see the comment on this video from them: http://vimeo.com/13026173). They were also approached by the onesocialweb.org team to work together and also dismissed the invite.

It seems however that they plan to align with the ostatus.org protocol, but so far no documentation of their architecture and protocol has been delivered. In Ostatus, the server-server messaging is HTTP based and using the PubSubHubBub and Salmon protocols.

A video demo of "hey look, click here and something happens over there!" is all well and good for impressing your mother, but not entirely useful looking forward. They've mentioned concerns with horizontal scaling and yet they don't consider the obvious option - Erlang.

In their presentation for Pivotal's Tech Talks series, they dismissed XMPP on the basis of not wanting to learn about it(!). Their dismissal of onesocialweb seems inappropriate on technical grounds. Also, HTTP is not the be-all and end-all. Not everything has to be shoehorned onto HTTP...

I second that. All of it.

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