Release of Diaspora v0.1.0.0

I have never thought the Diaspora project would succeed, because it's the social network nobody wants.<p>Honestly I think that in the startup community there has been an enormous failure to understand what makes Facebook so popular.<p>The most important features of Facebook are not the wall, and they're not sharing statuses or links.<p>The most important features of Facebook, are:<p>(1) Chat with a strong mobile app- for many people, Facebook chat has replaced personal (as opposed to work) email, texting, AIM, and Google Talk. It is a simple, sure-fire way to be able to contact anyone you know, and this is the single most important feature of Facebook. Does Diaspora have a strong chat? It doesn't have chat at all.<p>(2) Facebook groups. It is fairly common for an informal friend group to create a Facebook group for communication, or for an entire class of a university or high school to create an incredibly active group. Most universities have varying groups for varying purposes.<p>(3) Facebook events. It is common on college campuses for fraternity events and other student activities to be advertised through a Facebook event, and anyone who doesn't get invited to these events might feel out of the loop. Many informal invitations to parties between friends are also sent through Facebook events.<p>(4) The user's information page. Immediately upon friending someone, you are generally able to discover their religion, their politics, their interests, and, most importantly, their relationship status. In this way, Facebook is a very important tool on both the dating and friend scene for young people.<p>And, social networks like Google+ and Diaspora have utterly failed to properly address these features. Google+ took months to create events and groups, and honestly now the interface is so cluttered and clunky that I don't think it will ever be accessible to the basic user in its current form. Diaspora has utterly failed to implement any of these features.<p>Young people want a social network where they can quickly discover what kind of person each other are and what their social situation is, share events and groups with each other, and chat with each other, especially on mobile. Being able to upload photos is also important, but sharing statuses and links is probably the least important feature. A social network which effectively implements all of these in a minimalist, privacy aware way, would without a doubt succeed.

Diaspora reminds me of the tragedy of Duke Nukem Forever.<p>Due to Duke Nukem 3D's success, they had too much funding and thus was trying to always incorporate the latest and greatest in game development. Once they were nearing completion, a better engine would be released, and so they would start over from scratch. [0]<p>The original team behind Diaspora only asked for a little bit of money so they could get by while they spent their time working on it. Instead, they got too much money and recognition. Instead of delivering something half-baked, they drew it out and delivered something stale. The product they have now could have been what they delivered years ago, and years later (now), it could have been a successful competitor.<p>[0] I forgot what article I read which was really interesting and would have preferred to link to, but alas this will have to do: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Forever" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Forev...</a>

Diaspora highlights my biggest worry as an entrepreneur: building something for the way I wish users were versus the way they actually are.

Maybe it's just me that noticed or felt this, but often times a service or product builds up a lot of hype and ends up being vaporware. Diaspora got mainstream attention when Zuckerberg donated money to them and when they complained at the height of Facebook's privacy problems. But then didn't deliver until like a year later?<p>Similar thing happened with Google+. I remember my non-techie friends wanting to get in, but it took weeks for invites to open up until people didn't care anymore.<p>The lesson in all this: when you have hype, DELIVER THE PRODUCT.

It's hard to see this getting traction now, but I'm still glad it exists. Maybe Facebook will somehow fuck up badly enough to push people onto Diaspora, although I can't really see how at this point.

What kind of version is v0.1.0.0? First major version? First minor version? Something in between?<p>It would be so much easier to reason about version numbers if everyone would stick to Semantic Versioning[0].<p>[0]: <a href="http://semver.org/" rel="nofollow">http://semver.org/</a>

Due to the focus on privacy, I think Diaspora makes perfect sense as intranet social network for Companies, Govt, Colleges etc. I would wish Diaspora pivots in this direction

For those who asked about chat functionality in Diaspora - the project is looking into enabling a chat capability, naturally using interoperable protocols like XMPP. It's not as trivial as it seems though, since it will require running additional XMPP server on the pod. Another option is to allow using external XMPP accounts for the web UI.<p>Having a chat is not really the highest priority, since there are tons of federated XMPP servers around already, and standalone XMPP clients that are light years better and feature rich than any possible web UI. But having web UI for chat as a convenience is still useful and attractive, so see the discussion here about adding this feature:<p><a href="https://www.loomio.org/discussions/3678" rel="nofollow">https://www.loomio.org/discussions/3678</a>

Bah, empty white page until you enable Javascript.<p>Is there some sort of roadmap somewhere? I could not find one.

It's good to see Diaspora moving forward. Since the original creators team mostly stopped contributing to the project, it's now developed by community developers.