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Facebook Competitor Diaspora Revealed
jamie writes "A post has just gone up on Diaspora's blog revealing what the project actually looks like for the first time. While it's not yet ready to be released to the public, the open-source social networking project is giving the world a glimpse of what it looks like today and also releasing the project code, as promised. At first glance, this preview version of Diaspora looks sparse, but clean. Oddly enough, with its big pictures and stream, it doesn't look unlike Apple's new Ping music social network mixed with yes, Facebook."
Facebook has things pretty much on lockdown, as far as "full feature" social networking is concerned (not to mention the fact that, if wanting to be visible on a social network, most people already have a Facebook account.) I realize that at one time, MySpace had things all sewn up as well, but still...you know what I'm getting at. Anyway, like so many other things, hopefully Diaspora will bring serious competition, and help dictate the way some things are done.
If nothing else, it could at least become a social network for FOSS folks, which would be pretty cool.
Living With a Nerd
If this really wants to be a "competitor" to facebook they are going to need a lot more than just software. Of course they need users, but they also need a central organization and a LOT of servers. Facebook is more than just a software interface, they have a massive # of globally distributed data centers that cost a ton of money. I doubt any one organization is going to put the same amount of resources behind this project. More than likely, if this amounts to anything it won't be a facebook competitor but instead a platform for much smaller communities to use. TFA even mentions this(but its not in the summary. Of course being open source it is theoretically possible then to "transfer" your profile among communities, but that remains to be seen.
Monstar L
I don't understand how a piece of unreleased software can be considered a competitor to a service that (claims) to have 500 million active users.
Are there a load of open source social networks? I wasn't aware of any (not that I've looked past the articles on /.)
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Now, all they have to do is to convince 500 million people (or whatever it is FB claims today) to move over to their service that has no whistles or bells.
Umm..
1/ Build competitor
2/ Release to world
3/ ???
4/ Complete and utter failure.
The same could have been said about Linux a dozen or so years ago.
Diaspora allegedly gives one more control over their data, and how it is used, because as we all know, Facebook discussing "privacy" is like McDonald's discussing "nutrition"
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I don't care at all about the source code being released. Sure, they've released some Ruby code, which you can run, but that's not the important bit. We don't all use SMTP because Sendmail is open source (although that did help adoption), we use it because the protocols are well documented and different implementations can all interoperate. Release the protocol specs as RFCs, merge in feedback, and encourage independent implementations. Until there are two independent implementations, the protocol isn't worth anything.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The problem is that most people don't really care about something being open source and, unfortunately, these people usually make up the majority of the friends of people who do care. In other words, I'll use whatever everyone else is using.
I don't know. I think the lack of bells and whistles might be what causes some people to look for an alternative. I've quit using Facebook because of the bells, the whistles, the endless posts of what my friends like, pleas to like things that I don't like, requests to join groups I've got no interest in, and all of it from people I haven't had an actual conversation with or seen in 20 years, or even worse from friends of theirs that I've never met at all. If Diaspora strips social networking back to it's basics, if it lets me see what's going on with friends and family, look at pictures of their recent vacation and send a few "how are you?" messages, then I'm all for it.
Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo
So everyone in the world doesn't have a compatible server to run a seed on... The idea is that the geek in each group will.
You clearly had one that you could run it on, I have one that I can run it on (and thus my friends and their friends can readily use my seed, which can connect to your seed, etc. etc.)
I don't disagree that not running on apache is a load of bollocks but I also think you're blowing the requirements way out of proportion. 350Mb of packages to run it? that's nothing compared to the gigs upon gigs of photos and videos your users (friends) will expect you to host for them.
It's awesome if this first implementation is solid and fast, but not really a requirement: As someone else already said "it's the protocols, stupid". Assuming the design is good, competing implementations will take over if the original is somehow not up to par.
You realize that you can do *all of that* today with Facebook, right?
This seems like it's more a comment on how you're easily peer-pressured into accepting friend requests from people you don't like, and don't care to see updates from, and wish that technology would protect you from having to say "Sorry, we don't know each other well enough for me to add you," or "Sorry, but I get too much junk on my wall, I'm cutting back my network here to only family and close friends who I see / hang out with a lot."
From what's been revealed of Diaspora it looks exactly like Facebook. So what's the point of switching? I realize it's open-source, but that doesn't matter to the vast majority of people. Most who will come across Diaspora will see it as a Facebook-clone, with the huge shortcoming that no friends are on it. Most people simply want something that works sufficiently well and is used by a lot of other people. Companies are lured to Facebook because of the significant potential for marketing.
This is a problem with the majority of open-source projects I've come across. They don't try to improve on an idea or at least reinterpret it. They merely recreate it.
That said, I think the project is a good one. Perhaps the eventual release will be more compelling than what's been revealed. It's certainly got its strong points but it's got to have some hook that will lure people.
But what are the #s? Or rather what is the user/server ratio? Why it's X to 1 of course, so as long as at least 1 out of every X users of this new distributed site runs a node, they're equalling the "server power" of facebook in a sense.
What's is X? Well I have no idea personally. But I can say that, as a business, facebook would be likely trying to minimize X to save costs. OTOH, someone likely to run a distributed node is only looking at one box, and if they are going to run the node it's because they want to run the node, not because it clears some corporate budget.
The real question there is what value of X is the critical threshhold of where the tables turn...assuming "server power" is the magical metric in the first place.