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."

Comments

Re:The network effect

[The Clockwork Troll]

Traditionally it's said that the value of a network increases as the square of the number of nodes, however this considers only value generated by potential pairwise connections.

If a social network were geared toward linking groups of three for some maximum objective (business partnerships, sex, friendship, counseling, etc.) then by the same reasoning its value should vary as the cube of the number of nodes, and then this thricebook would kill facebook.

Those buzzwords don't fit my router!

[knarf]

And here I was thinking that the likes of Diaspora could be nicely installed on my router. With a load of luck and a pitchfork I might be able to get it on there because this router has more memory than my previous laptop but you might as well forget about getting this incarnation of Diaspora running on a WRT54GL. If lightning had not struck last month I'd still be running one of those with no plans to replace it until, well, lightning would strike.

I will try to keep an eye on what they are doing but I'm really more interested in the protocols and APIs they use and develop. One it all settles down I'd create something which interacts with their implementation without all the buzz they deem necessary in some nice, compact and high performance language. It might even fit on a WRT54GL then which would give it an instant base of who knows how many nodes...