What Diaspora Should Do with their Newfound Fuckyoufacebook Money

I suspect the first of many lessons Diaspora would do well to learn from Facebook: the hype cycle giveth, and the hype cycle taketh away. Right now, they're hipster Linus times four, getting fawning press coverage, and raking in donations from credulous blog-readers. Several months hence, with nothing that anybody would want to use working*, they may find the media, and many whose checks they cashed, suddenly less snuggly-wuggly.

Some expectation management is in order. A message along the lines like: "We are going to proceed deliberately, in a step-by-step fashion. We are going to start small with X, then add Y and Z.". Then they should then follow that up by releasing early and often.

I'm perturbed that "Get to work" is number 5.<p>Get to work, build a product. Build a <i>good</i> product. The rest will fall into place.

Yishan Wong (early Facebook employee) gave an excellent answer to this question on Quora: <a href="http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-potential-obstacles-to-Diaspora-catching-on" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-potential-obstacles-to-Dia...</a>. (Quora is still in private beta, but I'd imagine many HNers have accounts.)

OSS hints:<p>Create a repo<p>Post code<p>Accept patches<p>Tag releases<p>Maybe set up bounties for feature requests? The money kind of fucks up typical OSS dev projects, now that I think about it. But there are more than enough OSS hackers out there that will help. And having a "blessed" project helps too.<p>I'm eager to contribute actually.

From my understanding, their plan was to first figure out what they wanted to do before they do it.<p>If I was them, I would spend the next few weeks figuring out what it is their building.<p>Having a blog is probably a great idea for them though.

So, as I understand it, all this money is to work on an open source project, which is quite different than a startup. Now a well-done open source project inevitably leads to a company (Wordpress, MySQL, etc.) but that isn't what they said they were going to do with the money. (Somebody has to host all these nodes for joe-everybody.)<p>Are there contractual obligations of raising money with Kickstarter, or can they use this for legal fees?<p>If they can't use the money for a startup, I doubt they'd have trouble raising money for a company separately, though investors know that any software product developed will be open source.

They should look at SocNodes: <a href="http://www.socnode.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.socnode.org/</a><p>In particular, there is some real, actual, working code: <a href="http://www.socnode.org/code" rel="nofollow">http://www.socnode.org/code</a>, using PubSubHub for near-instant updates across multiple distributed sites.<p>The code there is in Python, but there is a (my) half-Java implementation linked from there too.

Getting that money would have freaked me out :)) making it impossible to do anything very productive under the glare of such media attention. If I were them here is what I would do:<p>1. Get organised.<p>2. Code for 3 months and then <i>stop</i> for some time and keep 10,000$ for the effort.<p>3. Start an Americal Idol/The Apprentice like program to create actual code in phases.<p>4. Setup a Jury with 3 luminaries like Bruce Schneier as judges.<p>5. Opensource projects can participate for bounties to create various pieces of the jig saw puzzle. The entire contest would not involve any actual travel. Just a mob of coders checking into GitHub and Google code and so on. Their own code also gets to participate in the contest ;-).<p>6. Try get guys like Larry Page involved... LOT of people apart from the poor geek on the street want to see FB dead ;-).<p>Note: These guys <i>are</i> celebrities now. They can easily become notorious. They are young. The best thing for them to do to themselves is to not get a bad name by blowing away the dough. If they keep the money away/use it as a catalyst for the FB killer, they will earn goodwill worth millions.<p>They can "encash that goodwill" over time. With their skills+goodwill they can at a future date start a real startup through a program like YC maybe even in an entirely different domain, and earn fortunes. Their greatest asset right now is that a LOT people will now listen to them for a <i>short</i> time. If they manage to pull it off, even more people who matter will LISTEN to them. That would translate to a lot <i>more</i> than the millions they may raise right now.<p>Wishing them luck. Hope they will be billionares some day. but not from donations, but from a real startup they create in either social networking or another area that really brings value to its customers.<p>Sudarshan.P

Write some code.

My advice: Clone Cloud27 [1] and get an initial version for people to play with.<p>Then fill out the more distributy bits later.<p>----<p>[1] <a href="http://cloud27.com/" rel="nofollow">http://cloud27.com/</a> its BSD licensed (IIRC) so should be good to clone/fork immediately<p>source: <a href="http://www.djangosites.org/s/cloud27-com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.djangosites.org/s/cloud27-com/</a>

The first thing I would do is hire someone to take care of PR so I could focus on coding.

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