

Google+ "inspired" by diaspora? - rajivrnair
http://raventools.com/blog/google-copies-diaspora/

======
jaysonelliot
I've never been too bothered, as a user, when one product "borrows" a great
feature from another, especially if they manage to deliver a better
experience.

I've had high hopes for Diaspora. Gave them cash when they were on
Kickstarter. Tried hosting my own Diaspora server. Waited for the devs and the
community to do _something_ with the $200,000 they raised.

Certainly a lot of hackers have done much more with much less.

In the year since Diaspora was announced, though, not much has happened.

Ask anyone in the general public if they've used Diaspora, and you're more
likely to get a confused "what's Diaspora?"

At the end of the day, there's really only one measuring stick for a social
service: users. We use social sites to communicate with our friends and
followers. Facebook is deeply flawed, but people have stayed there because
people were staying there.

G+ looks like the first real opportunity for people to leave Facebook without
losing the connections they've become addicted to. If G+ is going to be the
new default for sharing online, I really just want three things.

1\. Let me control my data and my privacy.

2\. Play nice with other sites, protocols, and standards.

3\. Provide a great user experience, including "borrowing" from other places
when it makes sense.

~~~
sebbi
Why is facebook "deeply flawed"?

@1. you can do that on Facebook, too ... they even have "circles" there, too

@2. facebook is the champion of playing nice with other sites, just look
around you ... everything is facebook nowadays

@3. facebook borrowed a lot and you can filter everything everywhere.

So maybe their UI isn't as clean as Google+ and they lack a great video chat,
but other than that, why should anyone switch to yet another social network
which does the same ... once was enough for many people, now that everyone and
their dog is on the leading network there is no incentive to switch away.

Google+ is coming to late to a party that started years ago and will suffer
the same fate as other Google products: only geeks will use them, no matter
how good they are (Wave :/) ...

~~~
timmyd
I agree also. I also think we all need to appreciate the fact that 99% of the
world uses Facebook BECAUSE it is a agnostic platform. I have a Gmail account
- most of friends "lay persons" in the tech world - use Yahoo or Hotmail, and
sure, some use Gmail. They check Facebook on their mobiles and website daily -
they don't particularly care about [or even know really] the "wars of
technology companies"

Facebook works. All their friends exist on it - it does everything they could
possibly want it to do "connect to their friends". In my mind - it's "Google
and Bing" all over. Bing works and is arguably just as good as Google these
days yet everyone continues to use Google.

Google+ - great for technology people who want to "control their data". Most
of my friends don't even understand what "exporting data for portability" even
means. They use Facebook, see their friends posts, upload photos, check-in to
places and they love that.

It's going to take a LOT MORE "innovation" to move them across to another
platform because "it's new, pretty and contains some nifty features that
Facebook already contains or will contain in the next 3 months of 'lock-down'
in response to Google+". I'm not on Google+ [outrageous request for invite via
my profile :D] - but I just can't see my friends moving to it - particularly
when they don't even login to Google anyway when they are searching.

Facebook will "win" in my mind - because they are agnostic to email and that's
where your "connections" lie and the reason you use Google "mostly"
[outrageous generalization again] is because you host your email on Gmail.

~~~
eavc
Google+ will succeed because it's simpler. Everybody wants to control their
data and have online relationships that mirror real ones in terms of context.
You think mom's don't worry about who can see the pictures of their kids? Or
non-technical professionals don't worry about whether or not it's safe to add
your coworker to your friends list?

Facebook makes that process tedious. Google+ bakes it in to the foundations
and at every step in an obvious way.

------
donall
I assumed the concept had come from Google's own research, which I first saw a
year ago in this slide deck: [http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-
social-networ...](http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-
network-v2?from=embed)

According to Wikipedia, Diaspora was initially funded in April 2010 and a
developer preview was released in September 2010. The Google slide deck was
published in July 2010, so presumably this is an idea they had been kicking
around for a while before then.

It seems that the notion of friend (circles|aspects) is just one of those
obvious ideas that everybody had, but nobody executed properly until now.

~~~
dspace
This is exactly what I was thinking, since I saw that presentation last year.
It could be that the Diaspora guys were inspired by the Google research, and
not the other way around. It just took Google longer to push it out to a
product.

------
inmygarage
It's unfair to say that Google copied Diaspora. When you're making a social
product there are only so many ways you can style a text entry box and only so
many words for "bundles of people". The feature set across _most_ social
products has at least some overlap.

Blatant copying looks more like the Plurk v. Microsoft situation from December
2009: <http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/14/microsoft-plurk-ripoff/>.

Pixel for pixel copying = lame, feature overlap = necessary.

------
rch
I think giving users the ability to build a social identity in G+ now, and
then export to wherever, could wind up being a big help to Diaspora in the
long run.

How complete is the export is exactly?

~~~
chalst
<https://www.google.com/takeout>

Currently it supports Contacts and Circles, and Stream. I haven't got a G+
login, so I can't say what form the data takes, but the other data I have
looked at was IIRC in CSV format.

------
hetman
What's interesting to me here is the impact the right naming for a feature can
have.

I think "circles" as in "circles of friends" would be intuitive to most users.
Probably because the concept corresponds to how people already organise their
social groups anyway.

An "aspect" on the other hand focuses not on the who, but on how you present
your self. I think this would be much more obscure for most users to get used
to even though the end effect is basically the same.

------
orenmazor
the future of diaspora is just NOW in doubt? not pretty much every single day
since it was announced?

I have immense respect for the founders of the diaspora project. they were at
the right place and at the right time to get some kickass funding and
publicity, but thats basically it. don't get me wrong. the idea is great, and
I'd love to see a proper competitor to facebook from the community.

and I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this.

~~~
technomancy
No, you'll get downvoted for pre-emptively complaining about getting
downvoted.

------
feint
Google was kicking around the idea of circles long before Diaspora. If
anything it was the other way around.

------
dirtyaura
I don't think they have copied Diaspora's model.

If you try to solve group communication problems, you by definition need to
create some model of groups, be it Circles, Diaspora aspects, Facebook groups,
IRC channels, email recipient lists, whatever.

Because both Diaspora and Google+ are clearly inspired by semi-public
_sharing_ model of Facebook, it's quite natural that their group model will
resemble each other, even be almost identical. If, on the otherhand, a service
is focused around group conversation instead of sharing, it's group model
might be one where groups are shared among participants, instead of being
private aliases.

However, what's much more interesting to me is how a service tries to
bootstrap "the group management".

In the beginning you don't have Circles and you don't have strong incentive to
group people to Circles when you don't know are you going to use the service
and how are you going to use it. Google clearly tried to make it more
enjoyable by providing fun visual UI. But it still feels a chore, because
benefits are unclear.

I would have emphasized it differently: start from a sharing experience
instead of group management. Use email-like recipient list as the basic model
and introduce the fun way to make group aliases after you have shared a few
items. It's more utilitarian model, which doesn't have as strong virality
factor as Google's approach. In Google+ you get something akin to invite when
somebody adds you to his Circle.

------
widget
The iPod wasn't the first mp3 player.

Facebook wasn't the first social networking site.

Google wasn't the first search engine.

Windows/Mac/Unix weren't the first operating systems.

Taking ideas from competitors and improving upon them is a fundamental part of
business. No one actually thinks that coming up with a product concept is the
same as delivering a product that users actually want.

------
JonnieCache
The interesting thing about disapora was that it was meant to be federated,
like wave, and email. Plus is not federated at all.

Therefore they are only similar in that they have targeted people's areas of
displeasure regarding facebook, and this is hardly remarkable. They were both
built specifically to compete with facebook, so this whole discussion is
almost tautological.

~~~
dspace
Right, Circles only solves the sharing problem. Diaspora has a much larger
ambition. Federation allows for communication between instances that are owned
and operated by different people, but it also preserves your privacy better.
Google wants all your data. However, you can install Diaspora on a home
computer so absolutely no one gets your data except what you share.

------
pgroves
The Appleseed Project also has had the idea of Aspects/Circles for a while
now. They call them...<dramatic pause>...'Circles.'

------
moondowner
It's natural Google+ to have someting similar to Diaspora, or Facebook, or any
other social community service.

And at the end of the day, It doesn't matter who was the first. What matters
is who will be the first that will do it right.

------
jeggers5
Diaspora was going down the toilet anyways.. why not recycle some of their
ideas?

------
naner
_The future of Diaspora is now in doubt_

When was it not in doubt? They got money and momentum during some Facebook
privacy blunder that was so ephemeral I can't even remember what it was about.

------
keith_erskine
Geez - Huddle was "inspired" by Padpaw, but I'm not bitter, much.

Lot's of ideas get tried out, some times they stick. Other times they take 2
or 3 starts/failures before they stick

------
michaelchisari
No disrespect to Diaspora, but they hadn't really come up with anything new,
especially nothing that a company like Google would have to look towards them
for inspiration. Livejournal had friends lists for a decade, plenty of other
projects were looking to federate social networking (Appleseed, OneSocialWeb,
FOAF, etc). I think this is giving way too much credit to Diaspora, whose real
innovation it seems was in the marketing/crowdsourced funding space.

------
loumf
Google has been working on Circles for over a year -- and it's based on
research they conducted before that.

[http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-
networ...](http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2)

------
clark-kent
For those bashing the diaspora guys, remember it takes years to create a
successful Open source project. Most popular OSS projects are at least 3-5
years old. Cut the guys some slack. HN readers should understand this more
than any other site.

------
andylei
are there any products that don't take features from other products?

------
StrawberryFrog
No. Google+ has shipped.

------
jeffchuber
I don't think that one can say that Diaspora owned the idea that we have
different social circles/aspects.

But still sad that Diaspora might close their doors. They can take pride in
the fact that their vision is being adopted.

------
sygeek
I'm wondering is Diaspora can sue Google for this "inspiration".

Anyway, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2714109> for google+ invitations.

------
ignifero
I remember viewing this presentation months ago, in which an ex-googler
presents the idea behind social circles:
[http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-
networ...](http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2)

------
aw3c2
Just yesterday I learned about <http://project.friendika.com/> which looks
like a nice distributed network too and maybe without the Diaspora troubles.

