Facebook Competitor Diaspora Revealed 306
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 dunno, man... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Software is only part of the equation (Score:4, Insightful)
Presumptuous title much? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Another one? (Score:3, Insightful)
Are there a load of open source social networks? I wasn't aware of any (not that I've looked past the articles on /.)
Re:What's the point...? (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:I dunno, man... (Score:4, Insightful)
A social network that limits it's audience to a specific group of people isn't very 'social'. It would fail if it was only for those interested in FOSS, at least on the scale of MySpace and Facebook and I don't think that's what the designers intended. From what I recall, they just want an open network that is a little more concerned with privacy than the existing giants. Diaspora is a perfect fit for that goal.
As to being the current 'number 1', I don't think that is even a goal as of yet, but rather just getting it off the ground and out there. If it's good and follows through on it's privacy and transparency goals, it will get there on it's own as there are a large segment of users on Facebook who are very unhappy with the way their data is being handled.
Re:Software is only part of the equation (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course they need users, but they also need a central organization and a LOT of servers.
Undoubtedley the will, but the system is designed to be distributed. Anyone can add a machine as a server. If enough people do it they might get somewhere - it worked for bittorrent.
privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the protocols, stupid! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Another one? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's the point...? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:I dunno, man... (Score:2, Insightful)
Or the people who won't use it because they don't know how to pronounce it
Or the people who won't use it because they don't know how to spell it
Some of my hickiest relatives tell me to go check out their "myspace" page, or their "facebook" page. I can't ever imagine any of them telling me to go check out their "Die-Ass-Pour-A" page
Great concept, lousy name
Re:I dunno, man... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I dunno, man... (Score:4, Insightful)
Also sounds slightly like diarrhea mixed with spore
Well you just described Facebook so I guess the name is appropriate.
Re:It's the protocols, stupid! (Score:5, Insightful)
If we had a standardized protocol then everyone (Google, MS, Apple, MySpace, Facebook, random company, universities, you, me, etc etc) can integrate the service into existing products or create their own implementation.
Click here to activate Diaspora on your (Google Me, Apple Ping, MSN/Live/Bing/whatever its called today) account. You won't even have to leave Facebook because if there is a threat of users leaving they will just integrate it.
Re:All flash, no substance. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:I dunno, man... (Score:5, Insightful)
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" [terrorism-info.org.il] to define obviously inequivalent events. They have also adopted the word "diaspora" [wikipedia.org] for their own cause.
Re:Looks great! Maybe I'll download it and start.. (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:I dunno, man... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's the point...? (Score:3, Insightful)
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."
Interesting, but not different enough. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Software is only part of the equation (Score:3, Insightful)
What happens when facebook does?
People understand that. Damnit, facebook is down. But when you split the community, people will say, "Hey, is diaspora down?" non-techie: "Dunno what's wrong, it works for me, maybe your computer is busted."
Service is down people understand.
Some part of the service that isn't actually connected to the service is down... People won't understand that.
It's like trying to get your computer tweaked for gaming. People pop in the DVD and expect it to install and run. When a cryptic error comes back "There is something wrong, click here to send a memory dump" Is it your video card, sound card, a driver issue, some other weird incompatability.
When Facebook goes down, it is Facebook that brings it back up. But the same will not be true for Diaspora, they will be reliant on that Third Party to bring that section of their users back online, or their users to switch to a new service.
Even though both services will have the same problem, any additional complication for the users will likely result in them dumping the system after getting confused.
Don't get me wrong, I like Diaspora, but I can just see this ending up like a LOT of open source projects in which things that people are used to are changed because the developer decided, 'It's better this way, get used to it.' It's what kills me every time I try to use GIMP. (Open Office seemed to learn this lesson) GIMP is damned annoying to just get it working without having to learn a new way of doing things.
Diaspora is going to have to make this aspect of itself damned near transparent to the users otherwise it's going to lose because of early negative opinions.
Re:I dunno, man... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bah. it's just NNTP all over again
Re:I dunno, man... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Another one? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.