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What Happened To Diaspora, the Facebook Killer? It's Complicated
pigrabbitbear writes "Created by four New York University students, Diaspora tried to destroy the notion that one social network could completely dominate the web. Diaspora – 'the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network,' as described on their Kickstarter page – offered what seemed like the perfect antidote to Zuckerbergian tyranny. The New York Times quickly got wind. Tired of being bullied, technologists rallied behind the burgeoning startup spectacle, transforming what began as a fun project into a political movement. Before a single line of code had been written, Diaspora was a sensation. Its anti-establishment rallying cry and garage hacker ethos earned it kudos from across an Internet eager for signs of life among a generation grown addicted to status updates. And yet, the battle may have been lost before it even began. Beyond the difficulty of actually executing a project of this scope and magnitude, the team of four young kids with little real-world programming experience found themselves crushed under the weight of expectation. Even before they had tried to produce an actual product, bloggers, technologists and open-source geeks everywhere were already looking to them to save the world from tyranny and oppression. Not surprisingly, the first release, on September 15, 2010 was a public disaster, mainly for its bugs and security holes. Former fans mockingly dismissed it as 'swiss cheese.'"
> Former fans mockingly dismissed it as 'swiss cheese.'
One has to wonder how cheesy the first few iterations of Facebook would have looked if their source had been open to all.
Ironically, its Facebook page probably has more likes than actual users.
Summation 2
The only place I ever heard Diaspora even mentioned at all was right here on Slashdot.
#DeleteChrome
Have grandma and grandpa and cousin bob already on it. Facebook has all of them already and why bother going elsewhere when all the people you actually want to socialize with are already on one network. In an unrelated note, Google+ has 400 million users and about 1/4 of them are actually active on google+
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
This is a completely sensationalist and somewhat deceptive post.
First of all, those security bugs existed in the first release, before Diaspora even went open-source. Discussing Diaspora's first bugs without mentioning its current project status is like complaining about the first release of Linux when Linux 3.6 just came out. The author is deliberately leaving out information about the current status of the project in a way that is intended to further a deceptive conclusion in the reader's mind.
Second of all, check out http://diasp.org/ because it seriously works.
Third, Diaspora is still being developed by its community.
Fourth, Diaspora had the equivalent of the "circles" feature before Google+ did. In fact, the first release of Google+ looked so similar to Diaspora that people started to talk. And acting like Google+ somehow made Diaspora irrelevant is totally stupid. Apples and Oranges. Big Data and decentralized social networking. They have different purposes and therefore can't be directly compared.
Quit with the sensationalist tech journalism. I don't even use social networking much any more, but considering the friends I know who swear by Diaspora, I know its far from the idea of "a few young kids" creating a failure, which is what this stupid article champions.
By the way, the name, Diaspora, it also sucks. Oh, and I don't have an FB account either but it has a better name.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
And yet, the battle may have been lost before it even began.
No it was lost when G+ came out with circles, which was Diasporas main killer feature.
The second killer feature being able to download all your stuff, which google ALSO does on "your account" "data liberation" page.
Honestly when I first saw G+ circles I though the almighty GOOG had bought out the diaspora devs or something like that.
the team of four young kids with little real-world programming experience
It is/was a kinda-federated intranet scale website, OK? They're not writing a OS, or a compiler, or hand coding machine code. In the olden days, one young kid should have been able to do it, four is a little excessive.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Diaspora has spawned other projects that attempt to carry on and refine the original goals. LiberTree is one of them, for instance. Just because the original team didn't succeed brilliantly doesn't mean that the original goals weren't worthy or attainable.
You need a good mix of introverts and extroverts in an online community. Linkedin has the introverts. Facebook has the Extroverts. Disaspore needs to define who their audience is before they build out the technology. Technology is nothing without the right people.
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
We are being suckered into an immense data gathering exercise for the sake of a few pages which are "ours".
Perhaps commodification is a better word. I sometimes feel that we have been duped into becoming a product rather than a customer or a user. Worse, this is becoming acceptable for many people.
The thought is disconcerting. After all, what rights do products have? What ramifications does that have for the future? We rely on some misguided sense that these companies or our lawmakers are ethical or reasonable enough to provide safeguards and prevent abuse. That is our only defence, and I have little faith in the competence or ethical integrity of either.
If our personal data is a commodity, as FB and Google and others seem to indicate by their business models, then its only a matter of time before systematic and serious abuses of that data mining become commonplace. Selling fucking personalised ads is the tip of an incredibly large iceberg.
So true. Brb, checking my MySpace on Netscape Navigator. BTW, do you have an ICQ #? If not, just Yahoo! my Geocities page.
They're not idiots over there at facebook. They took a cue from Microsoft. They know their survival depends on keeping people's data in facebook, and locked-in there. Things go in to facebook, not out. Your site links to facebook, not the other way around.
You would not need facebook if you were easily able to link up with other social networks, or worse yet your facebook friends were able to seamlessly link with your google+/Dispora/Whatever.
I think their biggest problem was setting up a kickstarter page before actually writing a prototype. Had they waited until the prototype was ready before starting the media blitz, they could have been humble about the current state of their code, and been honest about where they want to go. When it comes to software hype, capturing people's imaginations is key. They did that. But they didn't leave themselves any wiggle room. I've been there. Done that kind of thing. I totally feel for them, and what they went through. Everybody has to learn this stuff eventually.
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A serious misstep by the market leader leaves the market open for someone new. Pandas in WoW for example has had millions of WoW players looking for anything that's almost as good, but without pandas. Unfortunately SWTOR was a trainwreck and Guildwars 2 is a very different game (and nothing else has survived long enough to match them).
But I would say Call of Duty, Battlefield and Halo have all managed to find successful space for themselves in the FPS market.
With facebook the problem is getting marginal users to migrate. That friend who isn't tech savvy at all and doesn't know what google plus is or how it's like facebook isn't going to change. But because it's social there's nothing you can do to leave if the people you want to talk to won't leave too. I had someone yesterday try and tell me that the physical keyboard on a blackberry was the key to their stock price rebounding... because some people don't understand technology, at all, getting her off a blackberry is seemingly impossible, just as getting those friends who know nothing about privacy off facebook is impossible. With a social product you're kinda latched to the people who won't leave, even if something else is better.
For facebook their major misstep is going to be privacy. For those of us who are techies it *is* privacy, but facebook is going to end up doing something so catastrophically stupid that all the non tech savvy people are going to panic - or they're going to do subtle things with privacy that regulators are going to catch on to and dry up their revenue stream. Whether or not anyone else is well position to take their user base is hard to say, with myspace I think it was music and allowing you to make your page look like you were on an acid trip, but google plus and diaspora and twitter and everyone else trying to be the next big thing need a polished product to stuff in peoples faces the moment Zuck does something everyone can understand as stupid.
Also, while no one really succeeded in taking down the iPod directly cell phones have wiped out a huge portion the portable music player market by being better and more functional, and are essentially iPod killers. Trying to out iPod the iPod, I agree, not a great plan, nor is trying to out WoW WoW or out Facebook Facebook, that's where I think someone who sees a feature for a product for when facebook really missteps will do well.
History repeating itself? What kind of madness is that?
Out of interest, I tried to create an account. Way too confusing.
Apparently, you must join a 'pod'. What is a pod, what are the differences between Pod A and Pod B, do I have to join the same Pod as my known friends, can I contact people in other Pods?
Dunno.
Input textboxes that don't 'act' like textboxes.
Confusing uptime stats. (Is this Pod good or bad?) Do I care?
If you actually want people, yo must make the initial signup dead easy. If all you want is a developer wankfest, well, I guess you have that. Actual users, not so much.
Part of the reason for the slow failure of the project is the suicide of one of the co-founders, Ilya. A death has a lasting effect on any project, particularly a small one by people new to the whole thing.
It's almost like there's more to writing good software than throwing up a Kickstarter page and getting PR. Who knew that actual work would be involved?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Please don't drive and fiddle with your cellphone.
Probably has a bigger dick, too.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
100 million wasn't "extreme" at the time?
What we consider "extreme" on facebook right now might be eclipsed by another service in the future.
People are fickle and trendy..despite all the time they've put into facebook, if the right thing comes along at the right time and Facebook does something monumentally foolish, that perfect storm really hasn't happened yet. Google+ really should have been kept in the wings, tested and waiting for Facebook to just completely screw the pooch. Until then it really had no chance at all, nothing really does.
The thing is though, if someone wants to take down facebook they need to be the only other game in town. There really can only be one big social network at once, unless you've got complete duplication between them, but most people don't want to do that. If facebook screws up somehow and several competitors try and take over at once, and each of them takes a few users, what's going to happen is that eventually everyone will gravitate towards one of the networks. It is inevitable. Everyone needs to be together for it to be successful. However the chaos surrounding several competitors stepping in if Facebook leaves itself vulnerable will really only benefit facebook. A fractured user base means people will just turn around and go back to Facebook, unless facebook does something completely whacky like decide to start with monthly subscriptions or something. That would permanently drive people away.
iPods are another story.. I hardly see anywhere near as many of them now that smartphones are all the rage. Smartphones have completely replaced the basic iPod. About the only benefit you get out of an ipod these days is if you're using a shuffle while exercising. For most people it's more convenient to carry a single device, and outside of the iphone changeable batteries are usually sufficient, and at least with the iphone you can get those external batteries to charge it up if you need to.
You missed the early phase of Facebook when it was cool because it was only for colleges, had a clean layout (unlike the ugly pages people frequently had for MySpace). It was exclusive and pretty.
Firstly, The founder capped himself and Secondly, they're taking far too long on the product itself to get it to the open market.
But under the circumstances of what happened to Zhitomirskiy, I think it's understandable.
Are you certain about that? I've never played WoW in my life (don't want to get addicted, and I'm too easily addicted to gaming as it is) but I did read ArsTechnica's article about the latest expansion (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/10/impressions-mists-of-pandaria-is-more-than-just-pandas/) and the article plus comments suggests to me that this whole issue about pandas is blown out of proportion, and likely not as damaging as was expected.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
Diaspora is designed as federated software where many servers can be part of the same network and users and content are shared across those servers in interesting ways. The problem at present is setting it up is very messy and that suppresses interest people have in using it. Therefore I think the best way of increasing its use is to make the setup easy to get it into the hands of as many universities, libraries, schools, businesses and individuals as possible. Make Diaspora a no-brainer to setup - Diaspora in a Box - a script or executable that asks few questions and has a node up and running. If they get to this state then it's likely that some dists might even pick it up or at least support it to some level.
Yes and I have good reason to. The server-side handling of Google talk, Facebook chat and others means that I don't have to deal with the overhead of protocols like XMPP and instead rely on low bandwidth and low processing requirements of Oscar-like protocols (which is favorable on unstable network conditions, like when traveling and using mobile Internet). The mobile client for ICQ can rely exclusively on push messaging, which is honestly a God send when it comes to maintaining battery life. Since the other protocols are handled servier-side, I only have to use one application with push messaging on my mobile devices.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
It probably already is, but forget about the source code that didn't happen and make it into an ongoing FOSS project.
Get some enthusiastic and veteran programmers to take it over. There have to be more than a few uber geeks who don't like Facebook and who want something to replace it.
Some Google programmers may even contribute some of their spare time as it will chip away at their rival.
I have been programming a long time. I know how much work and how hard it is to make even something decent, but ordinary.
I have to admit that I was offended by the hubris of the original Diaspora group. That some college kids, with no real world programming experience who haven't even completed their educations yet were going to pull something like that off.
To be fair, I am still offended by Mark Zuckerberg's existence, that an ignoramus in his mid 20s who hasn't finished growing up is where he is.
I saw both of these contributing to the bullshit expectations bosses and others have that programmers can just "whip out" something nice, useful, reliable, interesting, etc.
Okay, I ranted my ugly rant.
I wish the kids from Diaspora the best. Their heart was in the right place. They can feel good knowing that they stood up to Zuckerberg, which somewhere along the lines will likely inspire others to do the same. It is also much better to try and fail, then never to try. They will have no regrets, be happier and enjoy victories other people will not for not having given it a shot.