The eventual Facebook replacement will look nothing like Facebook in terms of functionality. I wouldn't give a penny to a startup/project that positioned themselves against Facebook like this. Any variation of an "Open Facebook" of some sort is bound to fail.
Facebook's real problem is not user backlash from their privacy shortcomings, but the future of social networking in general. Some visionary will beat them to the future while they are busy milking the status quo.
There's a lot of things this project could do without replacing Facebook that I'd still consider successful. Four people thinking hard about making social networking better than Facebook for a summer could help "the eventual Facebook replacement" be better than it otherwise would be, even if this project itself doesn't turn into that replacement.
If that kind of advancement can be built into a well-engineered product with good UX, then we might really be looking at something that could start siphoning a bit of market share from Facebook.
That's not visionary only because that's what Facebook should have been from the beginning.
All early internet protocols where distributed before the web became companies playground and Conway law followed.
I think a visionary replacement will happen when something will just replace the cloud (which is too often a data ghetto) by giving users a way to easily and completely control their data and services, local as well as remote, in a homogeneous and synchronized way. A merge between the two approaches: "everything on the web" and "everything on your computer". Data (and metadata) and services being identities, media, documents, events, tags, access rights, version history, and links between all those things... So all this without giving all your data to google :)
It's me who's framed them specifically as a Facebook replacement in this post, and certainly what they're doing is a reaction to Facebook's issues.
But if you read their project description, it doesn't sound like what they're building only duplicates Facebook's functionality. They're talking about providing software to give you your own portable persistent data vault, that you can selectively allow other people & services to access, while keeping the ability to remove their access at any time.
That's pretty cool, and it has the potential for a lot more uses than what Facebook is doing.
I couldn't disagree more. A federated network of world facing webservers goes far beyond what anyone is presently offering. This idea is older than facebook. I would love for someone to pull it off.
Every other day, I get invited to join some "protest against Facebook's plans to introduce usage fees" group. I never got invited to a "protest against Facebook's privacy policies" group. (There may be such groups but none of my friends have ever mentioned it.)
Maybe positioning a competitor as "guaranteed to always be free" could be a better plan (even when FB will likely always be free).
Google could leapfrog into the next "Facebook" by doing to VNC/Remote Desktop/Hosting what they did to email with gmail. Give everyone a usable remote pc (whose interface adjusts according to the device accessing it) , one with cloud capabilities and the ability to install web applications with a few clicks. If there will ever be a decentralized FB that works through the semantic web, each application will need to be hooked in and have the ability to spider and data-mine, and always-on cloud-based pc's are the answer to that. Open sourcing such a system should also go without saying, otherwise all the hosting companies out there would probably go out of business :)
Actually jfornear, yes it is visionary. To think otherwise means you have only skimmed their material.
Based on their posts, they appear to be positioning themselves as a "Facebook Killer" solely to take advantage of the current backlash against Facebook (considering their current funding, I would say it's working). What they are attempting to create transcends anything we currently have; the closest you might come would be if you hosted a cryptographically secured peer-to-peer server only your friends could access (once you have that, now make it easily replicable and spread it across the net).
Get all of the above stuff, plus access to the nightly build server for Diaspora, so you can check out our progress all summer!
Huh? Wouldn't that already be public? This sounds like a cool project, but the secretive way of doing things is worrying. If I wanted that, I'd use Facebook.
EDIT: On further inspection, it looks as if this is open source, but only four months from now. Really guys? Is that your way of making this more open than Facebook?
My take on this is that they want to take 3 to 4 months of complete focus on coding and design. If you involve too many people by open sourcing it now - you could easily have a "too many cooks" syndrome and the whole project gets bogged down by too many opinions and too much time spent on moderation.
Put the work on something like github, let everyone fork to their hearts content, only accept back what you think is useful. Projects way bigger than this one use this workflow to great effect.
Two major red flags for me:
1. Money up front to a team of unknowns
2. Secluding your work for a big unveiling down the road
I wish them all the best but I think they were the surprise beneficiaries of a strong anti-FB sentiment, nothing more.
Sure, but they could always roll it out and say "The code is available, but fair warning - we want to focus on getting this up and running before we start reviewing suggestions."
Really...so releasing in 3 months is not fast enough for you? If it was me, I'd want to work on it for 3 months and during that time - talk to other folks that are working on similar issues and have the code reviewed by some trusted mentors. This is pure speculation on my part but I suspect they already have that in mind...per their blog:
"...If you want to see what we are up to, we will be hanging out on the GNU Social mailing list, as well as a few other places as we work on defining some common protocols between like minded projects."
I travel a lot and it constantly astounds me how many hotels want me to email them credit card details to secure a reservation. I had a hotel (in Spain) lose my reservation because I insisted on calling them up and reading my number over the phone rather than sending it via email. Frustrates me immensely.
Regardless of how you may feel about this team, this project, or the interesting name, it's at least clear there's some real momentum for an anti-facebook social network alternative.
This group seems to have some good energy but I agree with a lot of others about the name - they should definitely change it to something easier to spell and say.
I was just thinking that their name is fantastic. It conveys such a strong meaning: "we can't be all in one place anymore but we still relate". Maybe it's not a web2.0 buzz name, but at least I immediatly remembered it.
I agree. I was mentioning this project to a guy at work but couldn't remember the name. He was intrigued by the idea but that's where it ended. I'm sure as it gets more popular and I start hearing i more often I'll be able to remember it though a good name up front could help pick up steam early on.
I thought something similar myself. The notion of diaspora doesn't exactly conjure up warming thoughts, but instead someone displaced (of their own volition or not) from their native homes. It is a very emotionally charged concept.
I respect your underlying point, but I can't accept your examples as tasteless. Apache was named such in homage to the Apache nations (at least according to the Apache Foundation):
"The name 'Apache' was chosen from respect for the various Native American nations collectively referred to as Apache, well-known for their superior skills in warfare strategy and their inexhaustible endurance. It also makes a cute pun on "a patchy web server" -- a server made from a series of patches -- but this was not its origin. The group of developers who released this new software soon started to call themselves the "Apache Group"." (from the Apache Foundation website).
GIMP, while maybe a little less tasteful, at least is simply an acronym for GNU image manipulation program.
Neither of those examples resonate with the same connotations as "diaspora" (edit) to me. I can respect that the examples you listed might strike others in that way, however.
As you suggest, this is going to be a matter of personal taste. But to me, naming software after an oppressed people is prima facie gross. That kind of homage is patronizing by default. We don’t have a Jew filesystem or a Tutsi browser, however flattering they might be the minds of the founders.
I think it’s mostly irrelevant that Gimp is an acronym. As an extreme case, if the initials of my descriptively named project happen to spell the N-word, people would be right to question my taste if I ran with it. Obviously “Apache” is not the same as the N-word, but you can see the point. It doesn’t matter if the connotations in my mind are only wholesome: I’m assigning to symbols that are already bound in outer contexts, and that’s dangerous in human culture.
I’m not trying to be the political correctness police here. It’s not my job to get angry on other people’s behalf – I’m not Apache or physically disabled. But I would think very hard before calling a project anything like Apache or Gimp, and to me they seem at least as bad as Diaspora.
Anyway, I do see how a reasonable person could hold your position.
You're making some very well reasoned points here too, and got my upvote. I'm not sure if it's just being accustomed to Apache and GIMP as long-standing products, or what exactly, but I don't get quite the same visceral negative response to those names as Diaspora (or Jew filesystem or Tutsi browser).
I'm not out to be overly politically correct either, for the same reason - I don't fall into the category of anyone who could actually relate personally to the notion of diaspora. My personal reaction was negative, others here seem to like the name plenty enough. To each their own in this regard.
Yes, shindig is just the reference implementation. Oh yes, and http://code.google.com/p/partuza/ is a sample PHP social site based on OpenSocial using shindig.
I look back at the work I did in college and think "Christ on a bike, I was shit." I suspect I'll say the same thing about now in 10 years.
That's actually my main complaint about Facebook right now. It's been slapped together by college-level programmers, who are just about the least talented level you can bother considering as employable. If anything, I wouldn't be surprised if their stance on privacy weren't an ideological one but a technical one, i.e., they couldn't figure out how to make their bodged together system keep from leaking information like a sieve, so they called it a feature rather than a bug.
Yeah, that's been a bit of an issue for me as well. I'm coming to the conclusion that I got more done because I didn't know what I couldn't do. Well, to be fair, I never got anything done, I got a lot of things 80% done and got mired in bad design for the last 20%. Now, I tend to not even start because I don't have a good design.
I'm trying to correct that now, and I'm starting to see results, but it's slow, especially now that I just moved to a new city. One of the ways that I've used to force myself to get things done is to set up disincentives for failure, i.e. I will buy the hosting for a project as soon as I have the first prototype done, so the longer it takes me to finish, the more money I'm wasting having an unfinished project sitting around. Another way is to start releasing my code on CodePlex, which tends to force me to document things a lot better. Of course, those are things that are more suited to my personality: the perfectionist in me was what prevented me from releasing, so forcing myself to release brings out the completionist in me.
Really, what I need is my own personal secretary/intern to keep notes for me and finish the dirty work on my projects :D
This is why Facebook will eventally fail. Someone will come out with something better, and they will be so mired in their own spaghetti that they will not be able to react.
There actually seems to be a trend in programming blogs where everyone seems to be falling all over themselves to be the one shouting the most loud and clear how "bad" of a programmer they are. At least in their tagline.
I guess it's protection so if someone finds a glaring mistake, or several, they can just say "I told you so!".
I've noticed this as well, a sense of false modesty. I know for myself I'm not as good as I want to be, but I'm also better than most of my peers. That's kind of the key thing: I may not know what the right answer is, but I do know that so-and-so just gave a wrong one. Too many programmers espouse their crapness to be able to claim someone else's crapness and shoot down arguments against their ideas.
At a certain point, you have to stop thinking about what your skill level is and start just doing. Spolsky used the term Architecture Astronaut, which I definitely was going in to my first job out of college. Now, I rarely think about architecture up front, I think about requirements and the fastest path to them, with the post step of eliminating repetition. This ties into YAGNI and 7 Habits and OODA and all kinds of different decision making strategies that it just feels right through and through. Architecture seems to fall out from that and makes up for a lot of my own failings for design.
Point being: we're all at certain level X, and our relative level compared to other people isn't important, it's what we do with our personal level to develop and deploy projects. I've seen pure procedural code written in object oriented languages that got the project done and got it done well. I've seen object oriented systems with perfectly defined abstraction hierarchies fall over on itself. Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing against OOP with those examples, just saying "Code Elegance" be damned, you can't argue with "Shipped".
I don't know, maybe it's cultural. In 13 years in the industry I never ever met anyone who bluntly referred themselves as "talented programmer". And a few actually had grand egos..
But good luck to them with the project anyway. I like the idea, just that the opening line was sorta gross.
"The worst programmers are certain of their skill. The best secretly fear the day when everyone figures out they're no good."
http://twitter.com/izs/status/13509482462
My main concern for this is UX. I don't doubt that these guys have the engineering chops to pull this off, but do any of them have a background in usability? I hope this is factoring into their planning.
I like the idea but I don't like the AGPL. If their intent is really to solve the problems they state then they should be aiming for as wide a distribution as possible and, GPL should be good enough. If I can't host it & extend it locally without fear of my code becoming (A)GPL then it greatly limits my appetite for using the software.
If you want to create a Facebook replacement you at least need a name you can't spell wrong easily. Diaspora is not such a name, and there are several ways of spelling it and it still sounds right, for example:
dieaspora
dyaspora
dyasporah
You won't say that to your parents and guarantee they get it right first time when typing it in (although I guess that's what Google is for. Did you mean...).
It's a hurdle, and one they need to fix if there's any chance of this being a "distributed Facebook replacement"
You do realize 'Google' is a corruption of 'googol', right? :)
Besides, no: you don't have to optimize for the unwashed masses. But if you're making something to compete with Facebook, the most Unwashed Masses site since MySpace, you probably should if you want to be successful.
>You do realize 'Google' is a corruption of 'googol', right? :)
... to go even more meta, "googol" is a corruption of "google" - as the name was suggested by Kasner's (the mathematician) nephew. It was the last name of Kasner's newphew's favourite comic character, Barney Google.
I do, and I was enough of a nerd to appreciate the inference when they first launched, too :)
It's true that the value of membership in something like Facebook depends heavily on the network effect (allowing you to easily find all your friends there), and without a large community a project like Diaspora is unlikely to acquire sufficient utility to be more than a curiosity. But I really don't think the name will be a major barrier, either to ease of communication or due to semantic association. I stopped worrying about this after we got past questions like 'shouldn't it be W-W-W period com?' and 'what about people who are afraid of spiders?' etc.
I do think names are very important. There's a naturalness with which Normals say "do you have a Facebook?" that they don't seem likely (to me) to have with "Diaspora".
I think that an admirable trait of nerds/geeks/whatever is that many can easily separate symbols from their cultural meanings/connotations. We can treat "diaspora" independently, understanding its subtly ironic meaning (most of us don't think the Facebook diaspora is nearly as significant as other historical diasporas, but we don't take a site's usage of this name to diminish this history, either) but many would interpret such a 'flippant' use as mocking their cultural heritage and the struggles of their forebears.
One has to know one's customers. And ain't nothin' offensive about "Facebook".
Any data to support this? I've always been skeptical this mattered much. Google does a good job guiding people past spelling mistakes for popular services.
Nope, no data. But I'd rather own "super.com" than "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.com"! :)
I think your argument may be increasingly good as more browsers merge their search field with their URL field like Chrome does. On that note, it'd be interesting to see numbers on how often people enter URL-like strings into their browser's search field and then click the first link that comes back.
I actually think 'Diaspora' is a great name, and their spelling of it is the most straightforward one, so that once you see it, you can't really get it wrong again (this doesn't apply to many web company names).
This is definitely a developers' project for developers. I'd imagine the paid hosting (as Wordpress.com is to Wordpress) version would have a major branding re-think, and I wouldn't be surprised if many others used the Diaspora source to created better-branded hosted free versions, to try and convert the masses to.
Honestly, this comment boggles my mind. Diaspora is a perfectly normal word describing what they are trying to do perfectly ; I doubt many people would have trouble spelling it or looking it up on Google.
You also need a name that has some common usage. I have a decent vocabulary, but I did not know this word. Frankly, it sounds like a condition that might have one sitting on the toilet half the day. Just my $0.02
That was my comment, too - it's interesting how a program like Kickstarter has become a viable alternative to something such as, well, ycombinator. Noted, though that you're only receiving money here and not the other related benefits, which can be substantial.
I would value the overall 'y combinator' experience and expertise as a higher benefit than just the money in the program.
Even if I had an idea which I could self fund, I would still consider applying to Y Combinator, as the experience and networking you would receive would definitely benefit a project greatly.
The only thing that gets on my wick a bit about Kick-starter is that the funders essentially get nothing (other than see the product get created). I.E. This product could go on to be valued at millions and you're initial $1000 contribution to the seed funding would be unrewarded.
Absolutely. My startup went through AlphaLab, and the connections and mentoring was worth quite a bit more than the money, BUT the money did let me quit my job. Which is invaluable in and of itself.
True (and good point), but they also don't get the benefits of the mentorship, the alumni & mentor connections, and the shared drive of being with 10 other groups doing the same thing.
I doubt others with good idea's could do the same thing though. It's this particular idea, the facebook replacement, which interests so many people right now.
The AGPL won't allow others to do anything they want with it. A public domain license would. And a BSD/MIT license would be closer to a public domain license.
It seems to me this would allow the service provider approach and the ability to also have a commercial part (like the Funambol dual licensing approach...i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funambol). This doesn't seem like an overtly nefarious scheme to reach for your $5 :-)
They might dual-license it. It doesn't seem like they've put much thought into the design yet, maybe if you just email them they'll give you whatever license you want.
If you're asking for 10k from strangers, it might be a good idea to give your 3 minute video a couple of dry runs, maybe even (God forbid) WRITE out a script. Divide it up evenly, and each person needs to memorize a 45 second bit and film it over and over again until you get it right.
Obviously, not everyone shares my opinion considering they got 200+% funding in two weeks, but I was wholly unconvinced, most specifically by the "why us?" section - if you can't answer that question instinctively and convincingly, then (again, if I were the one doing the choosing) the answer would clearly be "not you."
I can't find it now, but discreet logic had discreet* and all of their products branded exactly like this during the '90s before they were bought by autodesk
The platform for decentralized sharing of private data has already been built. It's called HTTP and PKI. Glad to see that they're using this as their core.
However, they need to immediately purge from their presentation any ideas of "server" or anything sounding so hard for an average joe.
I realize it's just a start, but if v1 doesn't have a "click here to start your private seed" that's hosted on a cloud somewhere they are going to have a hard time growing.
If your momma can't use it to confidently and securely share pics in < 5 minutes, it's a waste of time.
That is the most self-contained codebase I had seen so far out of the few I studied (OneSocialWeb.com and DiSo-project.org do look more technologically advanced, but they have more dependencies).
The one thing that concerns me is that people will have to a) pay for the turnkey service or b) know how to set it up and probably have to pay for hosting anyway. People won't pay to leave Facebook. Maybe a competitor will start an ad-based turnkey site.
If they took 3 months to write a tool that would let you suck all your data out of Facebook, that would be useful. But I'm guessing they're not going to start there, because it's not sexy.
Nodes exist in a network and, in this context, can share information (status updates, social graph additions, etc. ) with other nodes. But these nodes would control what information they share the Facebook model.
Surely your "friend" can choose to run a node that conforms to the Diaspora protocol, but also forwards your information on. How does the trust/privacy aspect work?
You know, the same kind of friend that uploads photos of you drunk.
They can grow up, test, evolve and promote their system in Harvard? No? So how will they get users?
It is impossible to repeat the success of facebook (in terms of number of users and popularity), same as it is impossible to repeat the success of microsoft (in terms of market share). It was not just an idea plus execution. It was mostly about being in right place in right time.
Facebook's real problem is not user backlash from their privacy shortcomings, but the future of social networking in general. Some visionary will beat them to the future while they are busy milking the status quo.
This is not visionary, sorry.