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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."
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.
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.
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Diaspora looks like it's trying to be the next round in the Social Networking Site Cycle, which goes like this:
1. A social networking site starts up, allowing friends to stay in touch and contact one another, with good privacy rules to prevent bad guys from seeing that info, with maybe a few ads to pay for things but no other payments involved.
2. The social networking site (which is good at what it does) is successful in attracting new members. Network effects make the member base swell massively, while any competitors become passe.
3. The founders of the site want to profit from their hard work, so they go public or get VC funding.
4. The investors attempt to "monetize" the network via advertising, bloatware that people can pay to add on, reducing privacy rules, and so forth.
5. The social network becomes a slow bloated totally non-private piece of crap.
6. A couple of developers think "Hey, the dominant social network is a bloated totally non-private piece of crap. We should create something that does this better." And the cycle begins again.
This has happened at least once already with MySpace, and it's fair to say that Facebook is sitting somewhere around step 5.
I am officially gone from
I expect that a significant percentage of Google users don't know where that name came from and wouldn't care to find out, that the minds of Amazon users don't often turn to South America, and Dunkin' Donuts regulars don't often consider actually dunking their doughnuts. Once a word transforms into a brand, we tend to ignore the word.
Besides the fact that people don't care about words, meanings of words still get twisted and change meaning in the public's mind. Given we're talking about anti-Jewish/Zionist sentiments, I'll point out that many Muslim hardliners frequently misuse the term "holocaust" to define obviously inequivalent events. They have also adopted the word "diaspora" for their own cause.
Bah. it's just NNTP all over again
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