$200,000 from Kickstarter = 1 year of runway for Diaspora
dl.dropbox.com
dl.dropbox.com
About a year ago I became interested in why this is the case. I'm an academic computer scientist with a strong interest in the startup/web tech scene (see profile for info). My colleagues and I have been studying not just decentralized social networks, but the more general concept of decentralized architectures for personal data. This includes "personal data store" efforts which are popping up all over the place, with similarly dismal adoption, "infomediaries" which were the rage in the late 90s (before the dot com bust ate them up), etc. Overall, we've looked at around 80 companies, projects, and proposals.
If the amount of reinvention in this space is surprising, the almost wanton refusal to learn from others' past mistakes is shocking. These projects seem to do the same things wrong and fail for very similar reasons, chief among them building more technology when it's not really technology that's holding things back.
There is the widespread — but often unstated and always unexamined — belief among the participants that moving to a decentralized setting is a magic cure-all for the problems that ail today's status quo, such as privacy and interoperability. Sadly, this belief is simply wrong.
I certainly sympathize with the urge to pat these guys on the back for trying, but is it really courage or foolhardiness? If 10,000 amateurs have tried to solve P =? NP and failed, do we encourage the 10,001th guy to give it a shot as well, or do we tell him to learn some math and CS first, and gain an appreciation for why the problem is hard and probably not worth taking on unless you really really know what you're doing?
[Our study is not out yet, but feel free to contact me if you're interested in discussing this.]
It's an improvement over data sitting in a central silo waiting to be mined and monitored. How would you suggest tackling the problem?
I think this is a perfect example of the subtlety of the issues. Let's imagine that Diaspora succeeds and Facebook, MySpace, and Google+ all adopt its federation protocol; in that case it's likely that all of those companies would have access to most of what you post, effectively reducing privacy.
http://twitter.com/#!/flipzagging/status/16766878672228352
Diaspora is a sad story: a team with great intentions but little systems experience, becoming the standard-bearer for distributed social networking. They gained attention from some random factors (frustration with Facebook at a peak, NYtimes story, Kickstarter).
I think the odds of there being a single winner-take-all provider of social networking services (SNS), forever and ever, are slight. The idea that kids are going to stick with the SNS their mom uses to play Farmville seems ridiculous to me. So we should see some amount of fragmentation, eventually.
It also seems absurd to me that Facebook will remain agile enough to shut out competitors while also supporting 500M+ users. At some point, a situation should arise where competitor SNS services will find it to their advantage to be interoperable. That could end in an oligopoly, but that still counts as a more distributed social network.
Larry Page often likes to say "don't bet against the internet". And I am old enough to remember when people thought that Microsoft's Project Blackbird was going to kill the web. I am confident that SNS, like almost all internet services, will be commodified at some point, and probably sooner than we expect.
Caveat: this hasn't quite worked out for instant messaging, so I could be wrong.
Google Plus, which people aren't even really sure is a success yet, had 10 million users in less than a month. Is there some reason that you chose the number 1M as significant traction? If anything, those terms suggest to me that you're not really convinced it's going to happen.
1. People are uncertain whether Google Plus, a centralized social network, will gain significant enough traction to become a force in social networks.
2. Google Plus, in 2011, has had extended periods (weeks, months) where it gained 1M users every 3 days (the number of users in the bet). Thus, orders of magnitude more than 1M users is not sufficient to necessarily be a substantial social network.
3. In 2014, presumably there will be even more users on the Internet, and it will be possible to gain traction even faster than in 2011. Further, a social network might need to be even larger to be a substantial force in 2014.
4. Therefore, why would one set the threshold for "significant" traction for distributed social networks in 2014 at one network with 1M users, when that number may be orders of magnitude too small to be relevant in 2011?
(This ignores the question, of course, of what counts as distributed and/or what counts as a social network.)
Obviously, Google Plus is not distributed, or else one of the people would have already won the bet, since Google Plus already has millions of users!
I am confused, however, by your comment about users rolling over from Gmail. First, do you have evidence for this claim? (If anything, it seemed to be false in the case of Buzz.) Second, how is it relevant?
buddycloud already claims over 500K users and seems to have significant momentum, some developer discipline, and is using well-known standards, even if XMPP isn't everyone's favorite standard.
And as others mention, you might want to count identi.ca too.
If you think my bet is too paltry perhaps we can raise the stakes.
However, note I said greater than 1M monthly actives, which is a more serious measure of traction than just user accounts.
It's pretty easy for a network to get 1 million sign-ups, and then it's pretty easy to get 1 million people to pipe their Twitter status's into it. See Identica etc.
That doesn't mean is has significant adoption as a social network - it's really just a Twitter client.
I agree that there will be many social networks, but I don't think there is much reason for them to interoperate.
Take a listen to Eric Ries talk about his experience building an interoperable IM client[1].
He built the whole thing, then showed it to heavy IM users and they were (paraphrasing) "err.. why would I want that? I already run 6 IM clients, running another isn't a problem. And I don't want the same people to see me on each one"
We already have an interoperable, distributed social network for messaging purposes. It's called email. I doubt another one is needed. (OTOH, I did build a Pubsubhub powered demo of one back in the FriendFeed days. The technology was cool...)
[1] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2273
If people didn't want Eric's interoperable IM client, it wasn't for lack of a market.
I know lots of people using Linux on the desktop too. It's a market, but isn't really significant in comparison to its competition.
Aren't Google Talk and Facebook Chat both based on Jabber/XMPP, though?
What approach are you taking when looking at budding and failed social networks? Did you do a quantitative study or were you looking for patterns in a more qualitative fashion?
You're right, it's a bit outside the normal ambit of computer science. I'm interested in multidisciplinary questions; we do also have non computer scientists among the authors, for example Prof. Nissenbaum http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/
Overall, as you suggest, our analysis is a mixture of CS, economics and social science.
It is one of those areas where the same maths is applicable to seeming disconnected practical/physical areas, like how psychologists are starting to use the maths of quantum probability to model certain human behaviours (apparently it seems to much more accurately model the fuzziness of our thought processes than any "traditional" statistics methods).
The applicability of the same maths to seemingly disconnected areas is one of the things that convinces many that a "grand theory of everything" may one day be possible rather than there being disparate base laws at different scales and locations (or the third possibility of course: turtles all the way down).
The problem IS learning more math and CS, because odds are the people that make "yet another social network" already know about math and computer science as they use to be geeks.
So you are an academic and you believe they need more academics.
What they don't know is about marketing, aesthetics and art and psychology(things like Myers briggs PT) and all the multi facets that you need to know for a SOCIAL(people relationships) network.
People that love to program machines use to have a defined personality, the most difficult thing for them to understand is that there are other personalities as well that are different from them.
Donald Knut said that if he knew the work that it would be when he started typography, he would never had done it( this means no TeX, and Latex, and art of CS books).
Steve Jobs and Wozniak said that if they knew what they were to do when they created Apple, they would had never started it.
About being "hard", I don't think it was harder for this twenty something to create facebook than other SN. He just did it right.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Definitely not. They got funding to spend a year working on a dream project and they build a project that is now the 7th most watched on Github. They're doing quite alright.
Look at it this way: should the guy who sells his house and jeopardizes his family's future to buy a plot of land in Alaska to mine it for gold with a pick axe and a sieve be lauded as 'the hero in the arena'? Or is he just an idiot with poor judgement?
The quote isn't meant to absolve those who try of responsibility or even to nullify criticism; it's meant to help counter-balance the steady stream of nay-saying one is subjected to when trying just about anything with any visibility at all.
Surprised by:
* The 25k in what appears to be merch. Inclination: that's silly. Is this some crazy Kickstarter thing someone can explain?
* The ~8k in fees to LUXr, a "1 day a week for 10 weeks design residency for early-state startups". "Radically cheap", eh.
* The 1k trademark filing fee.
* That they actually spent $6k in a year at Rackspace. How many uses did they have? And ~$100/mo at Sendgrid?
On the other hand, these people paid themselves less than 1/3rd market salary, even after you account for the housing allowance.
And what do I know? I've never tried to start a social network (there's a reason for that, but...). Maybe 25k in merch is what it takes.
I’m estimating $15k for the T-Shirts, $1.5k for the stickers and $3.5k for the CDs. Maybe I underestimated one or several of those. $26k certainly doesn’t seem unrealistic for the merch and they had to ship it. It was part of the deal.
That’s actually one of negative things about Kickstarter: It can’t be good that someone who should and most certainly is busy pushing out a product suddenly also has to be this expert in getting merch made and shipping it to people.
I would assume becoming that expert is not easy and being good at dealing with merch doesn’t seem like a valuable skill the rest of the time – you know, when you are busy building a social network or doing whatever.
All this merch crap sadly seems to have become a staple of Kickstarter projects. Maybe it’s necessary to get people to pay?
They save on effort, and you take a few percent yourself. Scale means you can make better arrangements with suppliers, and quite possibly everyone comes out ahead.
Edit: to address the "is it even necessary?" question, I'd personally guess at 'yes'. Having some sort of tangible reward for your contribution, even if it's just a sticker, helps people justify the cost. Then they can wear your hat or t-shirt and get maximum indie "I funded them even before they were underground" credit. Also, free(ish) advertising for you.
Take into account these were 19-22 year olds, half of whom hadn't even finished their CS degrees, and didn't really have resumes to speak of. They're internship material, market salary would have been pretty generous.
...That’s an impressive start if victory was measured in press coverage, cash, and cool. Here’s the problem: Diaspora has all the wrong things at the wrong time. Competition that kills isn’t pre-announced — it catches an unsuspecting incumbent by surprise.... love the underdog, but I fear for the product-less underdog that has all the wrong things at the wrong time.
Unfortunately, they've probably squandered a lot of that initial publicity. They had a lot of doubters from the very beginning, and now that the project has dragged on this long, I'm sure that many are dismissing the entire thing as vapourware.
You know, I'm not sure if they have. People wanted to believe in this to the tune of $200k. Even two years from now, if they have arrived at something truly viable, it will be trivially easy to spin the PR wheel again. At this point, their main obstacle is demonstrating competency on the relevant technical problems and processes. If they learn to crack that nut over the course of, say, another year, then they'll be the come-back kid -- every bit as appealing an angle as their initial appeal as improbable underdogs with starry eyes.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/zuckerberg-interview/
on the topic of that email, taking credit for changing things? ha ha ha.
Perhaps. But let's not shortchange what an achievement having a blockbuster Kickstarter round really is. To get to $200,000 on Kickstarter, you have to work for it. You have to promote the hell out of yourself. You have to guerilla-market like a pro. The most successful Kickstarter projects -- the ones with the giant rounds of funding, well beyond their own targets -- have been the ones who got out there and drummed up interest, then brought the interest back to Kickstarter. (In contrast to the folks who simply sat back and expected interest to generate on Kickstarter).
It is a total myth that you can "set it and forget it" on Kickstarter, and that having a cool premise will rake in the donations on its own accord. It takes legitimate hustle.
Let's remember that these are pretty young kids. It's pretty easy to be intimidated.
True, although we should keep in mind that partial failure on Kickstarter = total failure. You don't receive any money from the round if you don't meet your target. If I set $10,000 as my bar, and I raise anything south of $10,000 (even $9,999), I don't see a penny.
I agree with you that this is probably not as emotionally devastating as being told "no" by some of the preeminent experts in the field of startups. (And I agree with you by and large, btw; I'm just spelling this out for others reading the thread who might not know how KS works).
I think they should forget about fighting Facebook and be the Wordpress of Social Networking. Ning was trying to the Wordpress.com of the space.
They could then offer the ability to create social networks like Ning did with premium features. But look at where Ning went wrong and iterate.
>Salaries (Four FTE @ $28.8k annually)
That's pretty awesome. Never thought about expressing it like that.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-time_equivalent and/or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-time
But then, I have to wonder if the Diaspora folks did it intentionally... they seem, how shall we say, "postmodem"?
edit: and I'm not saying they should have/could have done any better with the money they received. I donated to their kickstarter, and I don't feel like it was wasted.
Are there any people who code on this website that would work for under $30,000 a year?
I had been EXPENDING my own money for my own projects so that is minus $10,000 a year.
Oh, I almost forget, not everybody lives in NY or Silicon Valley, there are cheaper places to live around the globe where $30,000 is a lot of money.
From my perspective decentralized social network systems seem to be succeeding, with people running them upgrading their servers to cope with the influx of Facebook and G+ exiles. However, I think that Diaspora made a few mistakes which meant that they didn't get as far as they could have in the first year. One was poor communication about what they were doing and their state of progress. Another was a poor initial choice of software which made it hard to install.
$6.4k Rackspace cloud hosting and there isn't even an alpha version out- WTF!
Come on -you've got to get creative and work deals. Bootstrap!!
[1] http://blog.joindiaspora.com/2010/07/01/one-month-in.html