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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

A suggestion for Google to save itself regarding G+:

Donate some of its engineers' time to fix and revitalize Diaspora -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28social_network%29 -- or one of its peers or something along its original vision.

It could achieve its goal of disrupting Facebook, give users their privacy back, and by releasing the source code, could role back its role in maintaining the code or policing the community.

It could declare victory and move on, leaving its users more satisfied than they are now.

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Agree 100%.

If history is any guide, major players will end up doing precisely that, eventually: setting up an industry-backed open consortium promoting some kind of application-layer protocol/stack built around Diaspora or any its peers [1,2,3,4,5,6]. That plus another round of 2011-like Facebook fatigue could very well induce the required phase transition. Who knows though: perhaps newer, leaner companies like Dropbox or GitHub would be more likely to take the lead instead.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_prot...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tent_(protocol)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Social_Networking_... (Defunct, apparently)

[3] http://www.gnu.org/software/social/ (!)

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial (This MySpace-era protocol is interesting because it was initially supported by Google)

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus

>It could achieve its goal of disrupting Facebook

The Facebook (as a product) ship has sailed. Even Facebook knows this, which is why it's offering and paying billions to any products/services that can and/or have stolen its eyeballs.

Perhaps the worst mistake Google made in all of this was strategic: rather than trying to out-Facebook Facebook with a competing product (and nearly destroying their own ecosystem in the process), Google should have focused on using their considerable resources to snap up companies that were indirectly taking mindshare and audience from Facebook.

In so doing, they could have left Facebook's core product to Facebook and virtually surrounded it with other products/services for that inevitable time when people were ready for anything but Facebook.

In other words, they should have pre-empted Facebook's current strategy vs. it's prior one. As it is, Google is one step behind.

I agree that would be cool, but I don't think Diaspora offers anything compelling to the general public. What fraction of FB users actually care that much about privacy?

By the amount of stuff I cannot see on a public profile pages lately and the amount of hidden friendslists - quite a lot in my somewhat diverse circle of friends.

In my experience, amongst non-technical people, around 95%. Amongst techies? A strong 20%.

If that was accurate 95% of people would have stopped using Facebook when the NSA's wiretapping was uncovered. Last I checked Facebook hasn't missed a beat

They need facebook because they like their friends. Its immensely important to me that the government stop tapping my phone, but if you think the fact that I still call my grandmother is a sign of consent, you're a fool.

Most of the non-technical people I know are very VERY upset with facebook and privacy, but are still using it in much the same fashion as they're still using their AT&T phone or Comcast cable despite their distaste for policy.

Also that homepage is horrendous. The homepage doesn't tell me anything about why its relevant to me or how it can make my life better. It's selling me features instead of an experience.

"Host a pod"? What kind of illiterate donkey built this garbage. I could write a book about why this site is garbage as an alternative to Facebook.

You're replying to the wrong thing, and the comment is utterly worthless.

Have you got these numbers backwards?

Care? Most of them. Care enough to the extent they'd (figurally) vote with their wallets? Almost none.

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