Diaspora breaks $100k and all of Kickstarter's records

Rats -- someone here said, "I'd be worried if I was kickstarter at this point...", and as I went to reply to that, they deleted their comment.<p>But it's spot-on.<p>Short term, this is going to bring a lot of publicity and attention towards kickstarter, and that will also benefit the projects on there. If you'd like to launch something via kickstarter, <i>now is the time to do it</i>.<p>Because, odds are, what these guys roll out just isn't going to live up to the $100,000+ raised for it, and when that happens, that's going to reflect badly on kickstarter. I would guess that potential donors will be far more critical of future kickstarter projects; the foremost question on those projects is going to be, "Is this another Diaspora?"<p>The funding for this thing stopped being about getting this project off the ground, and has started being about a protest against Facebook. There's more than enough money in there to launch Diaspora now. People are donating now just to moon Facebook, and that's gonna end up hurting kickstarter later.

This is going to be the most overhyped and underwhelming web project ever. This entire group looks like they have vaporware written all over them.

I wouldn't give them a dime, at this point. They don't even have a proof of concept, and giving them more money than they ask for is certainly counter-productive.

To the naysayers, even if they don't deliver, this undoubtedly proves there is place for a facebook competitor.<p>And lots of people with money to back it up.<p>To facebook, you just jumped the shark. Perhaps you will never die, but your days are counted as king of the social web.

This seems like a great opportunity for Google to "donate" some senior talent to the project, blow this up into a fully functioning platform (optionally backed up on Google's servers), and one-punch KO Facebook.

If they keep this up they'll cross a million bucks in the next 18 days.<p>I'd start to feel a little uncomfortable if I were them by now, $10K is fine, but a million is a serious responsibility, even if it was gathered as small change. The surprising thing to me is how many people pledge fairly large amounts.

Success is all about incentives. In this case, by the end the kids probably end up with $100K-200K each. Perhaps the biggest incentive for them will be not to be those guys who got a jackload of money from donations and never delivered. Google remembers forever.

One thing I'd require in this donation model that they provide an online "billing" statement that shows (at least roughly) what they spent the money on.

Related to the whole Facebook fiasco, I just found this. I wonder how credible it is - that information is hard to verify. Basically, Zuckerburg allegedly IM'd his friend, and called early Facebook adopters "dumb f<i></i>ks" for trusting him with their information.<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...</a>

What programming experience do the Diaspora guys have?

Colour me unimpressed. Show me the code!

Source for "and all of Kickstarter's records" bit:<p><a href="http://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/13922920432" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/13922920432</a>

I am happy they are getting this much money, but what is more interesting is to find out who is behind these guys. Who had the connection to the NYtimes, why did the story get picked up. They went from 0 to 3,000 followers in 1 day on twitter. <a href="http://twitter.com/joindiaspora" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/joindiaspora</a> I have done some analysis kickstarter fundraisers, and why some fundraisers go viral and others don't. here is a quick example, same subject but only one was able to raise money <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/search?term=obama" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/search?term=obama</a>

I was personally going to donate to this project, but unfortunately, there seems to be little evidence that these guys actually are competent coders (not even code samples from their uni). So I fear that people are paying money simply because they hate Facebook, and that it may be mostly wasted.<p>I'd love to see this happen, but I do feel that there is a high risk that the end product may be garbage. So I urge people who want to donate to learn more about the boys first (a computer science degree doesn't necessarily guarantee that they even know basics such as proper multithreading or have ever touched sockets).

I'm all excited about this too, but does anybody even know these kids? Is anybody out there vouching for so much as their ability to program? 10k is a nice thing to risk at them, but 100k is pushing it in my opinion. 100k towards "a decentralized social network" sounds good, but 100k towards one particular decentralized social network sounds like trouble. At least it'll be open source so somebody else can take it and fix it if they screw up.<p>On the other hand, perhaps this money is useful for the market signal in itself, that this sort of thing is in demand.

While I haven't followed this story all that closely, what makes people so confident that <i>this</i> particular project will have legs?<p>From a quick glance at the description of their effort, I wonder whether this will really be viable. My mom doesn't use FB for any other reason than that it's the most convenient way to send messages and pictures to friends. For her to move to anything else, it has to be easier. Try explaining to your mother-in-law that she needs to install a node.

I'll be interested to see if, by the end of the summer, they have a working project and the turn-key hosting solution.<p>If they get this working, it'll be interesting to see what the adoption rates are. There might be some people with cash interested in using software such as this, but it still doesn't seem to have a draw beyond those with a deep knowledge of tech.<p>For instance, I'd wager that most Facebook users don't know what GPG is or care if it is being used or not.

With 10K , we hope to see something, with 100K, we expect to see something, with 1M, we better damn well get something.

This has reinvigorated my interest in Kickstarter. I lost interest when I wasn't able to set a high enough goal (some sort of field validation bug) for my first attempt to post a project.<p>Maybe I'll try something less ambitious this time around?

I doubt this will hurt Facebook. I don't believe regular users on the whole care about privacy. Especially if you compare the value of Facebook (all my friends, photos, events, chat) vs privacy cost.<p>One interesting implementation they could strive for is rather than expecting users to host their own server, ask them for an AWS key and use that - that way Amazon handles all billing, uptime, etc.<p>Also the name blows, and they're self professed nerds - generally terrible at making a user experience for regular users.

I see a lot of people worry about if they fail. I think in the community there are a lot of people here to make it a success, and I think at this point that showing a little opportunism would be good right now. Identify ways you can help that can create a win-win for both you and diaspora. Don't say you miss the party for this one.

I'm entertaining myself with the notion that a great deal of this money is from Zuck himself, funneled in via small amounts in a fiendish Xanatos Gambit[1] to make the inevitable flameout more spectacular.<p>1 - <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosGambit" rel="nofollow">http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosGambit</a>

Do someone know why they chose the name "Diaspora"? As far as I know, this word is heavily connoted, and may needlessly hurt some feelings. Would a more neutral name be fitter?<p>Also, could the name be changed at all, given the attention it already received?

They went from 10K to 100k, and they're probably going to end up with even more massive amount of money in the end. I'm really interested in seeing what they're going to deliver.

Too much hype and money can be dangerous. It reminds me of Cuil...

So I'm wondering - should they keep this a summer project or just take a leave of absence from school and give this project their full attention?<p>100k is some serious seed money.

I can't help but wonder how much of the money raised for these guys is going to be spent on the rewards promised.

the upshot to all this publicity is they'll get some competent advisors since they're now over their head for college frosh.<p>also they should probably take a year off and move somewhere other than NYC (unless proximity to help is worth the rent).

Have these guys updated their plans now to reflect the new funding?

$100,383 @ 10:02 AM PST.

What I don't understand about Diaspora is why can't one guy just start hacking out his own "distributed Facebook" replacement today. No team needed (not at start.) No money needed. Use F/OS/OTS software, all the pieces are just laying there. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if there were already several people out there doing <i>exactly</i> this already, but without the PR splash made by Diaspora.<p>Ok, maybe I've just answered my own question. It's only about the PR splash!

Their github repositories are unimpressive to say the least <a href="http://github.com/danielgrippi" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/danielgrippi</a> <a href="http://github.com/rsofaer" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/rsofaer</a> <a href="http://github.com/maxwell" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/maxwell</a><p>Judging by their open source activities, they are not people I'd give $100k to.<p>I've seen much more impressive repositories from students.

I have said it before[1] and I will say it again, this is obscene amount of money for something that not a thing that a very big portion of web is going to use and is not a profit generating startup.<p>[1]<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343399" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343399</a>

They're starting to look at some serious cash. I hope these kids use it wisely. A reasonable amount should be used for living expenses, but there's enough left over to hire a good quality graphics designer, and other contractors to help with the load.