
What Diaspora Should Do with their Newfound Fuckyoufacebook Money - derekc
http://blog.nextny.org/2010/05/13/what-diaspora-should-do-with-their-newfound-fuckyoufacebook-money/
======
kmavm
I suspect the first of many lessons Diaspora would do well to learn from
Facebook: the hype cycle giveth, and the hype cycle taketh away. Right now,
they're hipster Linus times four, getting fawning press coverage, and raking
in donations from credulous blog-readers. Several months hence, with nothing
that anybody would want to use working*, they may find the media, and many
whose checks they cashed, suddenly less snuggly-wuggly.

~~~
theoneill
Raking in _pledges_ , not donations. I wonder what the conversion rate is.

------
stcredzero
Some expectation management is in order. A message along the lines like: "We
are going to proceed deliberately, in a step-by-step fashion. We are going to
start small with X, then add Y and Z.". Then they should then follow that up
by releasing early and often.

~~~
ube
I think they provided that but it just wasn't obvious from the current entry
of their blog. Check this out: [http://joindiaspora.com/2010/04/30/a-response-
to-mr-villa.ht...](http://joindiaspora.com/2010/04/30/a-response-to-mr-
villa.html)

What do you think?

~~~
joe_the_user
With all the hype, I actually had really low expectations.

But their plan seems really good - do as little practical themselves, produce
a good protocol, go from there.

I'm look forward to their plan.

------
iamdave
I'm perturbed that "Get to work" is number 5.

Get to work, build a product. Build a _good_ product. The rest will fall into
place.

~~~
derekc
Should be #1 on that list.

~~~
hugh3
You might think so. But coding is the easiest part of what they need to do.
Not only do they need to figure out exactly what feature set they need to
implement, they need to have a plan to steal facebook users, a way of scaling
up, and a counter-response to any response that facebook might attempt. This
can't be a release-and-refine job -- their first version will launch with some
media fanfare and unless it rapidly gains momentum it will fail.

Writing some code isn't the first step here any more than "fire some bullets"
is the first step towards invading a country.

~~~
wvenable
> But coding is the easiest part of what they need to do.

I agree that it's easy, but it's also time consuming. They originally gave
themselves 3 months -- that's a vanishingly small amount of time to produce
any kind of fully working product.

~~~
panic
_They originally gave themselves 3 months -- that's a vanishingly small amount
of time to produce any kind of fully working product._

The first revision of Facebook (then Thefacebook) was written in about one
week, IIRC.

------
pc
Yishan Wong (early Facebook employee) gave an excellent answer to this
question on Quora: [http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-potential-obstacles-to-
Dia...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-potential-obstacles-to-Diaspora-
catching-on). (Quora is still in private beta, but I'd imagine many HNers have
accounts.)

~~~
zzzmarcus
Since when I registered for Quora the TOS said my content could be pasted
anywhere as long as there was a link back, I'm assuming it's okay to paste
Wong's answer here as well. I couldn't find anything on their site that
specifically says what license the content falls under, if someone finds out
differently, lmk and I'll remove it.

Yishan Wong, Worked at Facebook from 2005-2010.

"As it stands, based on available technical and product details, Diaspora is
the dumbest idea since OpenID.

Whereas OpenID absurdly required you to login using a URL (luckily no longer a
requirement) in order to preserve your privacy, which no one really cares
about, Diaspora apparently requires you to run your own set of web hosting
services in preserve your privacy, which no one really cares about.

However, there are a sizable number of people who think they care about
privacy, so there is a market for Diaspora.

The main problems with Diaspora being a successful parallel social network
are: Most women will not use it. See reason #1.

Instead, I will describe a product formulation for Diaspora that I believe
could be successful and achieve reasonable user adoption, by exploiting
interoperability with Facebook while providing user-driven privacy controls.
Diaspora guys, are you listening?

First, dispense with the personal hosting solution. This is a non-starter out
of the gate. Anyone who is willing to run their own hosting solution (virtual
or not) should just erase the personal details from their Facebook account,
put their content on a personal webpage, and list the address for the webpage
on Facebook. In fact, that's exactly what the web was in 1999.

Rather, this is how you do it for Diaspora. There are two key ideas:

People are unwilling to share personal information according to Facebook's
defaults, but there is nothing preventing them from having an "empty" Facebook
account populated with none of this personal information. Facebook does not
(and cannot, physically) pull information from user accounts on third-party
applications. Facebook can do what it will with information entered by users
into its website, but information stored by third-party applications can't be
taken and used by Facebook. (Technically, Facebook may cache this data in
intermediate formats when it is rendered, but they would have to be really
deliberately evil to be intercepting this data and using it)

Therefore, what Diaspora should do is become a Facebook Connect app. The irony
here is delicious - users who wish to use Diaspora as a "privacy-oriented"
Facebook will then do the following: Delete all their personal information on
Facebook except for their name and perhaps an innocuous profile pic. Use
Diaspora to provide all other core Facebook-style services, including the
profile info fields.

Then, Diaspora renders itself either as canvas page or a profile tab, and
displays the user's profile info for the user when other Facebook users browse
to that user's page.

What this does is it places all of the user's personal information on Diaspora
servers, which Facebook can then no longer access and send to third parties.
Access control is provided by Diaspora (rendering of the profile tab or canvas
pages can be controlled depending on who is viewing it). Users can still
interoperate with other Facebook users, so they don't need to migrate their
social graph, which is the greatest hurdle to Diaspora's adoption.

Diaspora can then offer users the options to store their information in an
encrypted format (accessing this smoothly on behalf of friended users will
make the product somewhat more complex, but I think it can be done by
delegating keys properly), and make available the application code for
inspection. They will still have to trust Diaspora's hosting to be running the
same code, but I will describe a way to handle that.

Diaspora can open-source the code and allow other Diaspora installations to be
set up, in case users don't trust Diaspora itself - a particular group of
real-life friends who mutually trust each other can just host their own
Diaspora installation and store their own information there. They will need to
create a new app on Facebook but that's pretty okay - it will become known as
a "Diaspora-style" profile if it ever becomes widespread. People will even be
able to keep accounts on multiple Diaspora services, for the purposes of
segregating their data, if they wish. The codebases for these services will
also inevitably evolve and advance.

Interestingly, Diaspora does not necessarily need to provide photo hosting,
events, groups, and other core Facebook services (but it can). Users can
already exploit this property of Facebook not being able to access third-party
data by using other photo hosting applications that they trust, and the same
goes for all other applications. In fact, this is true today. The irony is
remarkable, because much of the privacy worries center around how third-party
sites can now access user data, but by flipping this around and placing the
user data securely on a third-party site that makes itself a Facebook
application, Facebook cannot access that data and thus give it to any other
third parties. This is even the case when these third-party sites use Facebook
Connect for their authentication, because it still only credentials the site
to access Facebook data via API calls; it doesn't give Facebook the ability to
pull stuff off of a third-party app's database or anything - the app itself is
in control.

What is more, users can select the amount of privacy they want to personally
protect. To transition, a user doesn't actually have to delete all their
profile data off of Facebook (say you don't care if Facebook shares your
hometown with the world, but you do care about your relationship status) -
deleting all your Facebook data can be laborious. The user just deletes the
fields they want to make more private, and transitions only that data on to a
Diaspora service. It can then be managed with whatever higher-granularity
and/or opt-in access controls provided by that service; the remaining data on
Facebook that the user doesn't care as much about can remain under Facebook's
dominion.

By allowing open-source clone services, every "clique" of users only has to
rely on the local nerd to set up an installation, and all of the users in that
clique will be able to migrate some or all of their data from Facebook onto
their Diaspora service, and continue using Facebook without having to migrate
their social graph.

Lastly, based on my understanding of the views and temperaments of Facebook's
executives (including Mark Zuckerberg), they wouldn't ban this app and would
in fact tend to look rather favorably on it, if with a bit of initial
chagrin."

~~~
neilk
_Users can still interoperate with other Facebook users, so they don't need to
migrate their social graph, which is the greatest hurdle to Diaspora's
adoption._

No, the greatest hurdle to Diaspora's adoption is that Facebook doesn't
provide the user with any means to export their own part of the social graph
-- and in fact takes legal action against people who do.

I'm not interested in the argument of whether Facebook legally can or can't do
this; the point is, for many people, this is not a world that they want to
live in. Your suggestion doesn't do anything to address the central problem.

My next social networking service is going to provide me control over my
social graph. It should also allow me to port basic profile features from one
hosted service to another, much as I might do with an email address or a web
site.

You're right that moving people off Facebook is going to be difficult, as
there is a sunk cost issue. However, I doubt that the establishment of a
Facebook-scale social network is going to be a unique event in human history,
any more than MySpace or Friendster were. It may not be Diaspora that coaxes
people away, but people will take the trouble if there are benefits to be had,
and Facebook can't entirely stop all the tools to export friend lists.

 _Diaspora does not necessarily need to provide photo hosting, events, groups,
and other core Facebook services (but it can)._

Once again, the whole point is to interoperate seamlessly with services
outside anyone's walled garden, especially for commonly shared items like
photos, events, and discussion. It is already deeply annoying to have to make
separate invites for Facebook and non-Facebook friends. I can't believe that
you are even seriously proposing a dual system this while touting your own
expertise on what users really want.

BTW, I personally have tried to make an FB app that unified Facebook events
with events from other services such as Upcoming.org, and FB's API thwarted me
in this regard. Certain bugs made it impossible to distinguish between the
user's private and public Facebook events, so my app was inadvertently
publishing private events to their FB page. Some of my users complained loudly
about this -- you know, that privacy stuff that users don't care about. So I
determined this was due to a FB API bug, but amazingly the developers
WONTFIX'ed it as a documentation bug (the assertion that the API provided
privacy was the "bug"!)

But that's what we get for relying on a service provided by kids just out of
college who think they're god's gift to programming.

So, no, I'm not buying that one again.

No matter how well-funded, Diaspora is just one team with zero track record,
so they're not likely to be the solution to these problems. But I'm definitely
looking for something that fits the bill, and I highly doubt it's going to be
a Facebook app.

~~~
bertil
Can't you add a button (either “Join Diaspora to Friend me” for non-members,
or “BeFriend on Diaspora” for non-connected members, or “UnFriend of Diaspora”
otherwise) on each Diaspora-Profile page? That would allow users to switch
their relations by hand to another Graph, presumably distributed —— a lengthy
process, but one that would kick-start the transfer, and could be accelerated
with a “BeFriend all Fb-Friends with Diaspora accounts” button later on?

The private Events is a very good exemple of why cross-platform scuks, but I
don't see any other option than trying anyway.

------
risotto
OSS hints:

Create a repo

Post code

Accept patches

Tag releases

Maybe set up bounties for feature requests? The money kind of fucks up typical
OSS dev projects, now that I think about it. But there are more than enough
OSS hackers out there that will help. And having a "blessed" project helps
too.

I'm eager to contribute actually.

------
thefool
From my understanding, their plan was to first figure out what they wanted to
do before they do it.

If I was them, I would spend the next few weeks figuring out what it is their
building.

Having a blog is probably a great idea for them though.

------
frederickcook
So, as I understand it, all this money is to work on an open source project,
which is quite different than a startup. Now a well-done open source project
inevitably leads to a company (Wordpress, MySQL, etc.) but that isn't what
they said they were going to do with the money. (Somebody has to host all
these nodes for joe-everybody.)

Are there contractual obligations of raising money with Kickstarter, or can
they use this for legal fees?

If they can't use the money for a startup, I doubt they'd have trouble raising
money for a company separately, though investors know that any software
product developed will be open source.

~~~
seldo
The original request was for $10,000 to cover their living expenses for 3
months. Now they have $170k, they really have no obligation to do anything
with it other than support themselves for 3 months. So anything else is just
gravy. Which is why it is so COMPLETELY ridiculous that they have been given
so much money, especially given that they don't have a product or even a
detailed design of a product. They just have a lot of good intentions.

~~~
gruseom
If it works, it won't seem ridiculous at all. I like the pluralism of this
experiment. The odds are nothing will come of it, but that's what the odds
nearly always are.

~~~
seldo
I would have preferred to give 17 teams $10k rather than gamble $170k on these
guys. The whole situation is a mess.

------
nl
They should look at SocNodes: <http://www.socnode.org/>

In particular, there is some real, actual, working code:
<http://www.socnode.org/code>, using PubSubHub for near-instant updates across
multiple distributed sites.

The code there is in Python, but there is a (my) half-Java implementation
linked from there too.

~~~
joe_the_user
Looks nice but SocNodes doesn't solve the problem of limiting information to
friends.

It's a nice simple idea though, and perhaps it could be one layer of a
solution.

------
SudarshanP
Getting that money would have freaked me out :)) making it impossible to do
anything very productive under the glare of such media attention. If I were
them here is what I would do:

1\. Get organised.

2\. Code for 3 months and then _stop_ for some time and keep 10,000$ for the
effort.

3\. Start an Americal Idol/The Apprentice like program to create actual code
in phases.

4\. Setup a Jury with 3 luminaries like Bruce Schneier as judges.

5\. Opensource projects can participate for bounties to create various pieces
of the jig saw puzzle. The entire contest would not involve any actual travel.
Just a mob of coders checking into GitHub and Google code and so on. Their own
code also gets to participate in the contest ;-).

6\. Try get guys like Larry Page involved... LOT of people apart from the poor
geek on the street want to see FB dead ;-).

Note: These guys _are_ celebrities now. They can easily become notorious. They
are young. The best thing for them to do to themselves is to not get a bad
name by blowing away the dough. If they keep the money away/use it as a
catalyst for the FB killer, they will earn goodwill worth millions.

They can "encash that goodwill" over time. With their skills+goodwill they can
at a future date start a real startup through a program like YC maybe even in
an entirely different domain, and earn fortunes. Their greatest asset right
now is that a LOT people will now listen to them for a _short_ time. If they
manage to pull it off, even more people who matter will LISTEN to them. That
would translate to a lot _more_ than the millions they may raise right now.

Wishing them luck. Hope they will be billionares some day. but not from
donations, but from a real startup they create in either social networking or
another area that really brings value to its customers.

Sudarshan.P

------
bradly
Write some code.

~~~
dRother
And maybe hire some experienced programmers/project managers to architect the
system first? My experience with the code put out by fresh CS graduates is
that it's a bit naive and by-the-textbook, not surprisingly.

~~~
marak
there is a dearth of quality programmers in nyc who would help im sure

~~~
seldo
Do you mean a glut, or do you really think there are no good programmers in
NYC?

~~~
benatkin
The "who would help" part is relevant here.

------
tezza
My advice: Clone Cloud27 [1] and get an initial version for people to play
with.

Then fill out the more distributy bits later.

\----

[1] <http://cloud27.com/> its BSD licensed (IIRC) so should be good to
clone/fork immediately

source: <http://www.djangosites.org/s/cloud27-com/>

------
puredemo
The first thing I would do is hire someone to take care of PR so I could focus
on coding.

------
rubyrescue
original article [http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2010/5/13/what-
diaspo...](http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2010/5/13/what-diaspora-
should-do-with-their-newfound-fuckyoufacebook.html)

