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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
Oh, it's written in ruby? Never mind. /starts language war
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 /.)
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I gave the developer preview code a run today, and all my hopes as to what Diaspora could be died. It took too long to produce so little that everyone's outrage at facebook's privacy has been compartmentalized into a hollywood movie on the subject, and thus rendered irrelevant.
To be a seed you are going to need a hosting provider that supports ruby on rails with a freakishly huge list of gem dependencies, that is also running the thin webserver - that's right it doesn't work on apache (parts of it worked, but most of the ajax stuff didn't because it requires the eventmachine interface). In fact, installing all the dependencies on an ubuntu server running a LAMP stack still required an extra 350+Mb of extra packages as all the ruby and mongodb dependencies, for a so far tiny web application. Talk about bloatware!
So although it may look good, it's been put together by crApple fanboys, aka morons. WTF were they smoking at burning man to make them think this was worth it? Gimme some of that sh*t!
Now I can network with all 3 people that care about both FOSS principles and social networking!
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
While the source being open is pretty important, the really important thing is that anybody can host a Diaspora node and link to anybody hosted on any other Diaspora node. And Diaspora will also include ways to link to people on things like Facebook. The idea is that just because all your friends are using X, you can still be linked to them effectively without using X.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I have always wondered why we needed Diaspora when there are already so many projects. Why not work on one of the existing ones.
Things we are working on next for our Alpha in October:
from http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/09/15/developer-release.html
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.
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Of course there are open source social networks. I cannot believe you don't know GNU Social!
You're several years too late. You're thinking of webmail, which was a later transition. People moved from AOL (or CompuServe, or BBS) mail to SMTP hosted by their company, ISP, or even by AOL, long before webmail became popular. Checking your mail from another computer just wasn't that interesting to most people until the web was a lot more common, which happened a good five or so years after AOL and CompuServe abandoned their proprietary mail systems and moved to supporting SMTP out of the box.
Webmail didn't take off until the late '90s. Proprietary email systems died off in the early '90s, except for internal corporate use.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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...
--frank[at]unternet.org
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."
Maybe this: http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/browse_thread/thread/3eceb21134faada1#
I just want to let you all know that I'm offering free Diaspora seeds at http://diasporahosting.eu/. And yes, the name is temporary. :P
Google might pick it up. Android shows Google's willingness to adopt openness as a "scorched earth" policy against competitors who're doing end runs around Google's core business. All the other social networking sites like hi5 might adopt it for strength in numbers vs. facebook. You could even imagine IM programs like skype jumping on the social networking bandwagon through variation on Disapora's protocols.
Also, friends-to-friend file sharing is the untapped killer app for social networking, as easy invisible widespread friend-to-friend piracy could finally muzzle the MafIAA bullshit. For example, Skype could steal facebooks thunder tomorrow if they built social networking into their client, but supported filetypes beyond merely photos. Friend-to-friend file sharing might emerge in Disapora if people started using stand alone clients, just support more filetypes than merely photos.
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The only one I'm aware of is Appleseed. It's also distributed, it's in development for several years now, has working beta-servers, and is probably much closer to a final release than Diaspora.
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.