
Facebook Alternative Diaspora Launches Their Private Alpha With Some Bet Hedging - bjonathan
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/23/diaspora-alpha/
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pavs
Yes, its right in the frontpage at this moment. Whats the point of this
freaking submission?

Does every story need a "TechCrunch version" to be submitted separately?

It happens _all_ the time.

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b_emery
I'd chalk it up to a bland title in the other, which I bypassed several times
even after reading your comment. Here's the link:

<https://joindiaspora.com/>

I appreciate the commentary in techcrunch on their release. For example:

 _Interestingly enough, it sounds as if Diaspora is heavily predicated on
lists, which they call “aspects”. This is interesting because Facebook is
going in the opposite direction, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that
people on their service don’t want to make lists._

Now I know why I hate the facebook UI!

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michaelchisari
_CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that people on their service don’t want
to make lists._

For the life of me, I can't figure out how they could make such an unusable
UI, and then determine by it's non-use, the disinterest of their users.

I can't tell if they're being disingenuous or ignorant. One need only look at
the popularity of Gmail's labels, or other user experience with categorization
to know that users have no issue making lists of their contacts or data.

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natrius
Categorizing emails is inherently simpler than categorizing your friends. It's
so simple that you can automate a lot of it (though you could suggest friend
lists by analyzing a user's relationships and existing lists). Beyond "family"
and "work", friend lists are complicated.

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michaelchisari
It depends on how categorization works. If it works more like labels (ie, I
can add a friend to multiple groups), then it works great. If you have to
choose only one group for a friend, then it breaks down immediately.

And beyond that, privacy controls which allowed you to do "AND" type operators
would make those even more useful. It's pretty easy to code, the hard part is
a usable, intuitive UI, and I find it hard to believe that Facebook, with all
their resources, can't come up with a way to solve that.

And plus, even if a minority uses a feature like that, it's important enough
to provide, because user education will result in a gradual adoption.

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natrius
It works like labels, but it's still hard, and it's not that useful anyway.
The new groups are a simpler concept that provide an easier way to share with
a limited group of people.

> _And plus, even if a minority uses a feature like that, it's important
> enough to provide, because user education will result in a gradual
> adoption._

Friend lists as they exist today allow users to limit the visibility of posts
to the exact set of people the user wants to see them. From what Facebook has
said, it seems like user education did not result in meaningful gradual
adoption.

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jganetsk
"Share what you want, with who you want"

Sorry to be a grammar troll, but shouldn't it be "whom"?

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carussell
No, no. You share the "who", too.

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unicornporn
OK, so they were to hip for MySQL/PHP. How many shared hosting users have
access to MongoDB + ROR? I say fail, as in failed decision.

