Open Letter to the Diaspora Dudes

Off topic: if you look at the kickstarter page for Diaspora <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p...</a><p>Notice how for anyone who donates more than $5 they need to send them a CD with Diaspora on it. $25 gets them a t-shirt etc.<p>For 6k donors, they're going to spend ~$50-100k of the $200k they raised just meeting their commitments. Not to mention a huge amount of time dealing with the logistics.<p>Edit: Jesus, if you account for the fact that they promised 1 year hosted service, and 1 year phone support for anyone who donated more than $350, these guys are already underwater.

He's got a branding problem as well. 'Socknet'? And foolishmortal.net looks like pre-beta HN.<p>Geeks sometimes don't seem to understand the power and value of word choice, or design. Smart word choice and updated design is not sufficient, but in a Web 2.0+ world, it's necessary.

&#62; I looked over the web and I found the same thing that I'm sure you found: several projects without much steam behind them.<p>Maybe they found socknet too ?<p>That wiki was filled on may the 19th, well after the diaspora stuff hit the media, or it hasn't been updated in ages before then.<p><a href="http://socknet.net/wiki/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&#38;limit=500" rel="nofollow">http://socknet.net/wiki/index.php?title=Special:RecentChange...</a><p>That money the diaspora guys raised has one definitely negative side effect, there will be quite a few people that may try to get a share of the cake.

Is there a rule that says that if you're going to work on a distributed social network you have to be bad at naming things? socknet, really?<p>Also, do we really need a solution that is distributed or would a dropdown box on Facebook that says "Visible to:" and lets you select a group (e.g., Friends, Family, Everyone) do?

Why did this need to be an open letter?

I think all this decentralized social networking is unnecessary. All we really need is an easy way to switch social networks. Something like a list of UUIDs as your friends list which can be imported into your social network of choice, and exported when you want to leave.<p>Even email is centralized.<p>The only problem would be getting the current industry leader, facebook, to willing adopt such a thing. They probably won't so this would be more of a consideration for the next generation of social networks.