Wikipedia lists close to 40(!) distributed social networks. [1] None have achieved a meaningful amount of adoption.<p>About a year ago I became interested in why this is the case. I'm an academic computer scientist with a strong interest in the startup/web tech scene (see profile for info). My colleagues and I have been studying not just decentralized social networks, but the more general concept of decentralized architectures for personal data. This includes "personal data store" efforts which are popping up all over the place, with similarly dismal adoption, "infomediaries" which were the rage in the late 90s (before the dot com bust ate them up), etc. Overall, we've looked at around 80 companies, projects, and proposals.<p>If the amount of reinvention in this space is surprising, the almost wanton refusal to learn from others' past mistakes is shocking. These projects seem to do the same things wrong and fail for very similar reasons, chief among them building more technology when it's not really technology that's holding things back.<p>There is the widespread — but often unstated and always unexamined — belief among the participants that moving to a decentralized setting is a magic cure-all for the problems that ail today's status quo, such as privacy and interoperability. Sadly, this belief is simply wrong.<p>I certainly sympathize with the urge to pat these guys on the back for trying, but is it really courage or foolhardiness? If 10,000 amateurs have tried to solve P =? NP and failed, do we encourage the 10,001th guy to give it a shot as well, or do we tell him to learn some math and CS first, and gain an appreciation for why the problem is hard and probably not worth taking on unless you really really know what you're doing?<p>[Our study is not out yet, but feel free to contact me if you're interested in discussing this.]<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network</a>
My initial reaction was to feel bad about these kids. Then I remembered about Theodore Roosevelt's speech about the man in the arena, and I congratulate them for giving it their best shot. Whether they continue or not, it was worth trying and they've had an amazing experience in the process.<p>"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Nothing <i>too</i> crazy in here.<p>Surprised by:<p>* The 25k in what appears to be merch. Inclination: that's silly. Is this some crazy Kickstarter thing someone can explain?<p>* The ~8k in fees to LUXr, a "1 day a week for 10 weeks design residency for early-state startups". "Radically cheap", eh.<p>* The 1k trademark filing fee.<p>* That they actually spent $6k in a year at Rackspace. How many uses did they have? And ~$100/mo at Sendgrid?<p>On the other hand, these people paid themselves less than 1/3rd market salary, even after you account for the housing allowance.<p>And what do I know? I've never tried to start a social network (there's a reason for that, but...). Maybe 25k in merch is what it takes.
Although I agreed with most of Jason Fried thoughts on dispora, I thought the jury was still out. It turns out his prediction was right.<p><i>...That’s an impressive start if victory was measured in press coverage, cash, and cool. Here’s the problem: Diaspora has all the wrong things at the wrong time. Competition that kills isn’t pre-announced — it catches an unsuspecting incumbent by surprise.... love the underdog, but I fear for the product-less underdog that has all the wrong things at the wrong time.</i><p><a href="http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2330-diasporas-curse" rel="nofollow">http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2330-diasporas-curse</a>
I've noticed a sudden, sharp rise in Diaspora's outreach efforts in recent days, ranging from activity on Facebook, to direct emails. It looks like they're trying to get things moving again, from a PR perspective.<p>Unfortunately, they've probably squandered a lot of that initial publicity. They had a lot of doubters from the very beginning, and now that the project has dragged on this long, I'm sure that many are dismissing the entire thing as vapourware.
So, with no money left and no business model in sight and (most important) no enthusiasm about Facebook killer and with G+ in the wild, is that the end of Diaspora?
is it a coincidence that this coincides with their announcement about continuing the project? I got an email an hour ago, <a href="http://pastie.org/private/5xrgn6cmuyrylbwngvv5a" rel="nofollow">http://pastie.org/private/5xrgn6cmuyrylbwngvv5a</a><p>on the topic of that email, taking credit for changing things? ha ha ha.
I'm not worried for them. If they're entrepreneurs they'll either work hard and make it work, pivot or if they want they'll get hired by someone.<p>I think they should forget about fighting Facebook and be the Wordpress of Social Networking. Ning was trying to the Wordpress.com of the space.<p>They could then offer the ability to create social networks like Ning did with premium features. But look at where Ning went wrong and iterate.
I love the nerdiness of their salaries:<p>>Salaries (Four FTE @ $28.8k annually)<p>That's pretty awesome. Never thought about expressing it like that.
Just goes to show how much pushing a real idea out the door can actually cost - there are plenty of people out there burning this kind of cash and going broke, and never even getting the sort of media coverage these guys got.<p>edit: and I'm not saying they should have/could have done any better with the money they received. I donated to their kickstarter, and I don't feel like it was wasted.
The one thing which struck me is how expensive a year's worth of cloud hosting is. No wonder there has been such a kerfuffle about "the cloud". The other costs - including rewards - are pretty much to be expected.<p>From my perspective decentralized social network systems seem to be succeeding, with people running them upgrading their servers to cope with the influx of Facebook and G+ exiles. However, I think that Diaspora made a few mistakes which meant that they didn't get as far as they could have in the first year. One was poor communication about what they were doing and their state of progress. Another was a poor initial choice of software which made it hard to install.
Super interesting.
The take-home of this seems to me to be that the most expensive part is paying yourself. 100k for salaries for four people is the bulk of the expenses.
Luxr Training?? Really? 28k on rewards/fulfillment??!<p>$6.4k Rackspace cloud hosting and there isn't even an alpha version out- WTF!<p>Come on -you've got to get creative and work deals. Bootstrap!!
strange that Pivotal labs help to diaspora [1] doesn't figure in this PL statement. Was it all free?<p>[1] <a href="http://blog.joindiaspora.com/2010/07/01/one-month-in.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.joindiaspora.com/2010/07/01/one-month-in.html</a>