Diaspora* a peer-to-peer secure social network focused on privacy

[LMNO]

I stand before you, unrepentant.

[Richter]

Repenting a horrible, multi layered joke is a worse offense that dropping it in the first place.

[Triple Zero]

btw reading a bit more about this diaspora thing, it's kind of weird ...

I still hope they succeed, really.

But the strange thing is, this little cute team of 4 college nerds has actually no real code to show for it, just a bunch of (really cool) ideas, yet they already reeled in 10 times the amount they were aiming for (YUP they got about $100k now).

Unsurprisingly, a bunch of other startups that were quietly already doing pretty much the same thing in their own time, that actually got a bunch of working prototypes ready are a littlebit less than thrilled.

For some reason this all seems to tie in with the NY Times. They published the article and made this thing (everybody everywhere really seems to be waiting for) really REALLY popular. A littlebit of Twitter and blogosphazzles did the rest.

The fishy thing, or maybe it's not really fishy but just exactly what it looks like, the NY Times is bashing Facebook left and right. Not just in de Diaspora article, but also in a lot of other articles concerning FB and privacy. [like this interesting infographic and this Q&A with a FB exec]

The only thing is that I just got this sudden sinking feeling. These 4 nerds just got $100k in (pledged) donations in a couple of days, what if they're not for real? Or, assuming they are indeed for real, how do we know they're any good?

I know random groups of 4 coders can still fail spectacularly, even if they're supersmart college kids. Though from the looks of it, they got a bunch of requirements for successfull startups just right. Most importantly, they seem to really Love what they're doing, they're making something because they want to use it themselves and they have an idea that is something other people really want.

I hope they succeed, but so far I've seen nothing to show that they are particularly better than the other startups that have been working on pretty much the same sort of idea. And it's not the exact idea that is most important. Cause once they really take off it's bound to morph depending on what people Actually want.



In addition to that, I wanna remark, that if they're good and pull it off, I see no problem at all on tackling the "lock in" problem, that is, getting people to migrate away from Facebook. It's a social network, think of it the other way around, if you notice a whole bunch of your friends using Diaspora, wouldn't you get on it as well?
Facebook is only just starting to get some popularity here in NL, we got another, dutch-oriented social network website. So does Germany (one that has a bit more to do with schools and university, but the main function is the same), also there is LinkedIn and Twitter. The social network ecosystem isn't nearly as Facebook-dominated as you might expect from looking at a certain US demographic. Also, before Facebook, people were using MySpace for the same purpose (now it's mostly band-promo). And in the Netherlands I've seen at least two different iterations of the social network concept that were pretty popular in their times.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I was a little surprised by the amount of work they haven't done. They're supposed to be releasing it as open source -- what happened to release-early release-often? I haven't seen any code, but there's the statement that they got a version working just with twitter on their project page.

That said, if this turns out to be vaporware -- well, it indicates that people are willing to pay a total of ten thousand dollars (maybe more by the time I posted) for an equivalent that doesn't even exist, which should make everyone actually doing it at the very least motivated by the illusion* of it being lucrative. People make money on cons all the time, and it wouldn't be the first time a group of college kids got a bunch of startup money and failbombed.

Now that I've looked more into what they are trying to do, it seems a little less far-fetched. In fact, it sounds like an afternoon project (though, while I do things in afternoons, I do them in familiar languages and cut corners -- it might take months to make something like this as secure as they want it to be). They are certainly lowering the bar with the whole it-links-into-existing-networks thing, though it is a slightly funky thing to be doing since it runs counter to the stated goals, making the project into a bidirectional social network aggregator for paranoid nerds who own servers.

000, are you suggesting foul play on the part of NYT? Not to put words in your mouth, mind you -- that's just how I would parse the situation. Facebook-bashing has been the rage for quite a while, but there's really nothing visible in it for NYT to have a vendetta against facebook (not like there is for Time and Newsweek to have inexplicable boners for twitter). For the tinfoil hatters out there, facebook privacy violations are just a blurry doorway into some pretty deep shit: for instance (and this is trufax), facebook was funded by a corporation named In-Q-Tel, which is (officially) the public corporate face of the CIA.


* NB: I'm using the word 'illusion' in the assholishly pedantic denotational form, not in the colloquial form interchangable with 'delusion', because I'm having a hard time coming up with an equivalent word that works in that sentence. The distinction, for anyone who has a life, is that a delusion is provably false while an illusion's veracity is unknown.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

It's worth my $5 just to make Zuckerberg feel the cold hand of fear pinching his anus for the rest of the summer. My prediction; he's going to try to sell his little empire by September.

[Triple Zero]

I don't really suspect foul play, I don't really know what to think, I just noticed how this project was suddenly booming and NYT's role in it, plus their recent articles on FB.

Also, Nigel's right, it's awesome to give FB cold sweats regardless!

[BabylonHoruv]

Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook -> ???


There's always the next thing.  It doesn't even have to be better (hosting music on MySpace is a fuckton easier than on Facebook), it just has to be cooler.

Kids want a network their parents won't be on.  Give that to them, and they'll jump ship.

And parents want to be on the network their kids are on, and will thus soon follow.

[Captain Utopia]

Unsurprisingly, a bunch of other startups that were quietly already doing pretty much the same thing in their own time, that actually got a bunch of working prototypes ready are a littlebit less than thrilled.

For some reason this all seems to tie in with the NY Times. They published the article and made this thing (everybody everywhere really seems to be waiting for) really REALLY popular. A littlebit of Twitter and blogosphazzles did the rest.

Arguably they've already done the hard part - getting the mind-share is a more impressive feat than having working code at this stage.  Not indefinitely, but since they're off-loading the scalability issue to the user, they can spend more time on features than optimisation.  I think that simplifies their task significantly.

[Triple Zero]

HEYYYY FP IS BACK

[malvarma]

Look. They did something.

http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/07/01/one-month-in.html

Looks like they have some working code. Too bad they haven't put any online yet. Or if they did, I can't see where they put it.
Looks somebody didn't read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".

[Captain Utopia]

Are there any in-depth tech docs on what they're doing?  As far as I understand it, a "seed" is basically communications point-of-contact for an individual... and that is software which manages authentication and message passing between different seeds?  So you can run your own seed on your own hardware with an external IP address, or have a large corp host your identity for you?

I have the feeling that they're pretty much winging it.

I can't blame them for not opening up the repositories though.  There's a point when getting outside help and eyes on the code is awesome.  Right at the start when you're still redesigning big parts of the architecture - not so much.

[Cain]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11108891

An open alternative to Facebook will be launched on 15 September, the developers of the project have said.

Diaspora describes itself as a "privacy-aware, personally-controlled" social network.

The open-source project made headlines earlier this year when Facebook was forced to simplify its privacy settings, after they were criticised for being overly complex and confusing.

The project, developed by four US students, raised $200,000 (£140,000).

"We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th," the team wrote on their blog.

The team said they had spent the summer "building clear, contextual sharing".
Continue reading the main story   
"Start Quote

    I think there will be a lot of people watching to see just what the team come up with"

End Quote Maggie Shiels Technology reporter

    * Read Maggie's thoughts in full

"That means an intuitive way for users to decide, and not notice deciding, what content goes to their co-workers and what goes to their drinking buddies. We know that's a hard [user interface] problem and we take it seriously."

The project was started by three computer scientists and one mathematician from New York.

Their idea of building it gained momentum earlier this year during an intense period of criticism of Facebook, the world's largest social network

"We want to put users back in control of what they share," Max Salzberg, one of the founders, told BBC News at the time.

The team turned to the fundraising site Kickstarter to raise the $10,000 they thought they would need to build the network.

In the end the team raised $200,642 from nearly 6,500 people.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, reportedly donated to the project.

The initial release on 15 September will be to "open-source" Diaspora, meaning that the team will make the underlying code available for anyone to see and modify.

Many believe that it will be difficult to challenge Facebook, which now has 500 million users and is currently estimated to be worth $33bn.

I'll be checking it out, at least.

[Telarus]

Sweet.

[Triple Zero]

For completeness, it seems the BBC's source for that news must have been this blog post on the Diaspora site:

http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/08/26/overdue-update.html

[Cramulus]

sweet! glad to see this thing is still on schedule. I keep half expecting there to be some major fuckup on the token that it's being developed by a cabal of college kids. Let's try to make a good Discordian showing on launch day, eh?