Ask HN: Now that Google+ is out, is there a need for Diaspora?

2 pointsaymeric2 comments

I feel a bit for the guys at Diaspora. What a roller coaster they had!

They first got a lot of press coverage and they got funded. Then for several months the press started to be negative become perceived progress was too slow.

And now Google+ is out and everybody loves it.

Is there any way Diaspora can succeed?

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Google+ is another iteration towards a fuller understanding of what people want for "social networking" online. Eventually, our understanding will stabilize somewhat, and we'll have a pretty good idea of what it means to "provide a social networking service."

Today we now know what it means to "provide an email service", and you can choose from a variety of email service providers that all interoperate. That's the vision of Diaspora (and a number of similar efforts): to enable you to choose from a variety of interoperating service providers (communicating with each other by standard protocols).

Google+ is still centralized, and compared to Diaspora it's downright evil. It does nothing to advance the conversation about distributed social networking.

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