Diaspora - Moving Forward
"For the past few months, we’ve been pretty quiet, because we’ve been hard at work."
They are building a product whose success requires overcoming network effects. 90% of what they need to work hard on is not being quiet.
Im pretty upset with their performance in general. When I develop, I release quickly and iterate like my life depended on it. I would have loved to see them start standing up real servers to get people joining and over time they overcame bugs, new features etc.... They haven't even done that. Its quite a shame they have taken the Microsoft approach to releasing code and NOT taken the Facebook Approach to releasing code. If they ever wish to take over the social environment, they MUST release then build instead of build then release.
Its driving me crazy that I can't even start using their service all the while Facebook over takes all social networks.
All that post really said was: "We're still alive."
Edit: I expected some insight into where it's going, given the headline.
A lot of people have related to Diaspora as if it's a startup, but it isn't. It's a free software project, and the rules and expectations are very different.
Everytime I read anything from those guys, it's all just a bunch of words, hype and promises.
I really hate to piss on Diaspora parade but people are kind of fed up with new social networks, they don't want to change again and again. I believe FB is the final draw as far as generic social networking goes, besides, FB is too embedded around the web.
FB has more than 500M users, if privacy and data is what drives Diaspora, for most web users that's almost useless since FB already "owns it". Maybe geeks use it, but I don't see it gaining anything relevant compared to Facebook or Twitter.
As I said before, my only interaction with them is an email I sent them a while ago (more than a year ago), advising them to seize the opportunity to create a p2p framework for social applications to be built on top on, taking care of permissions, friendlists, authentication, etc under the hood to allow developers to build the fun stuff on top of that.
The response I got, six months later, was to the effect of a brief "thank you for your email, answers to some of your questions can be found in the FAQ".
What an abstract collection of words. This post doesn't contain a single tangible sentence.
"We are working on an outline of what we have learnt so far, and where we see Diaspora going in the next year."
Right.
They should take a look at how BitTorrent is trying to build a P2P social network. Maybe they could get a few ideas from there and implement them. I'd like to see a social network where a true "global" community can be formed, and by that I don't mean only having people from everywhere, but also having people and communities that don't answer to any one Government, at least related to what they post in that social network. I'd like to see a social network that would make revolutions even easier, and even allow the Chinese to make one if they want to, and for that it needs to be very safe and very decentralized so it can't be stopped.
Diaspora will be the Hurd of social networking.
They are going to have to move more quickly if they want to make a dent. I respect that they're still going strong, but the fact that they haven't done anything yet speaks louder.
Diaspora had a lot of momentum and was endorsed by famous names, but failed to engage with and target the target market - which is mainly software folks and freedom beards running ARM servers. Only once you have a sufficient developer community (a high enough beard count) can you hope to take on the unwashed user masses and industry pteranodons. Probably one of their main mistakes was not to use the accumulated funding to support someone in the role of a community manager. To engage with developers and early adopters you need to have regular and informative communication, and Diaspora's blog output has woefully fulfilled neither of those criteria.
The tone is defeatist, I wouldn't expect the project to survive another year.
They should let me in on what they are doing with my 1k pledge.
Am I the only one who'd basically forgotten about Diaspora until this popped up?
I like how they make the ridiculous claim that they are the third search result for "github" on google. What probably happened is they have personalized search on and they upped themselves to #3 by clicking themselves so much.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Diaspora bring on some more experienced, less risk-tolerant engineers in the near future. They have a grand vision, for which the "minimum" viable product is almost identical to the final version, and bringing more manpower to bear on the problem might not be a bad idea.
I thank the Diaspora community so much for creating such a large-scale open source Rails application. Coming from years of PHP experience, I had such a hard time learning and getting used to Rails, but digging through the Diaspora repository has really helped me in terms of understanding what should be considered "production level" Rails code.
What I don't get... why not just use elgg...?
That's pretty interesting. I never knew that Diaspora is using Ruby on Rails.
The alternative would be to be "Moving backwards". Why not discuss about their design choices instead? or their choice of programming language? Why do we need an invite to try it? What if the social networking fad wanes before they release v 1.0?
Diaspora needs to just launch. They are repeating the same mistake Google Wave made. If it's invitation only, your friends are not on it, so there's no reason to use it.
I give it 0.01% chance of succeeding if keep things the way they are.
Seriously, a year of fucking development? Facebook launched after a few hours.
Cool, but my startup is doing something similar. http://openpoke.org/2011/05/16/moving-forward.html