I'm impressed and surprised that they have released code. I worried that the initial flurry of money and hype would derail them.
Many projects never get this far, and for this, they deserve to be commended. They've built something and dealt with a lot of external pressure at the same time.
Apparently they spent some of the money on working with LUXr and Pivotal Labs. The best technical solution can be derailed by a poor user interface and experience. It looks like they avoided that.
Actually Diaspora hasn't spent any of their money with us, (us = Pivotal,) we're just giving them space to work in, and occasional advice when they ask for it. It's been fun to have them around, and we're glad they're open-sourcing and getting feedback like this.
I just downloaded and ran the project, and to be honest, I didn't see more UX work than what could have been done in an afternoon's worth of googling around for some templates.
That's for super-power-users, maybe in 5 years for advanced users. If you attempt to do this with either unsupported browser or on unsupported website your browser will act very non-userfriendly, like by opening dropped file. Because of this it would be foolish and dangerous to even inform the vast majority of users of this feature.
From my observation their UI is just copied Facebook UI. And my issue with this is not lack of originality. Rather it's the fact that people will now compare Diaspora functionality with that of Facebook. Furthermore anything working differently will lead to frustration, as certain behaviors are expected.
Perhaps, but I'm not convinced. If you are going to have similar features and interface your only advantage left is The Fear of Privacy. And frankly, it's getting a bit old. It's the Facebook and Google that will change people's expectations and habits. You can create something that will work better but I see it as those auto-destructing emails. No privacy is better than false privacy.
drag and drop uploading is like 10 lines of code for the usual suspects.
Not taking anything away from the diaspora guys, I havent tried the application, just mentioning in case anyone thought drag and drop was too much of a hassle to add to their app, it can be done in a few minutes.
There is this famous story about a consultant who is called in to find the error in an expensive machine. After a while he marks a place on the machine with a cross. The bill is 100000$: 0.01 for the chalk used to make the cross, 99,999.99$ for "knowing where to put it".
The story is Tesla visiting Henry Ford to fix some electric motors he had on his production line. The amount of the bill was $10,010. Ford called him up later to ask why ten thousand and ten, when Tesla quipped the famous quote ($10 for the chalk, $10,000 because I knew where to put it).
Ah cool - I had just googled for the origin, and only found a story on a "business jokes" web site (they used 50000$). Didn't know it has a real origin.
I think it speaks to the support network available for entrepreneurs in NYC. Charlie O'Donnell of First Round kicked it off, from what I recall, with this post advising Diaspora on how to make it through the immediate chaos and get to building. Many people spoke up via blog posts and tweets to suggest simply getting to work as quickly as possible and to not set the vision too high yet.
I saw them shortly after at MongoNYC where they were getting a lot of attention. In spite of that, they just focused on learning what they needed and hearing the talks about people's experiences.
This is exactly the kind of focus that's needed to get the job done, so not only should it not be surprising, it should be expected. In spite of that, I'm stoked to see it.
Many projects never get this far, and for this, they deserve to be commended. They've built something and dealt with a lot of external pressure at the same time.