Diaspora's Proposed Social Media Model

I think it's important to mention that this PDF pre-dates their Kickstarter campaign, lest anyone think this is a new architecture discussion.<p>I really want these guys to succeed for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is that they were lucky enough to stumble onto a bit of buzz around the project), but I have this fear that they're going to go hide in a room for a few months and then release something they consider "complete" (but without any peer review, collaborative development, or user testing), to the collective yawn of the Internet.

Will be interesting to follow Diaspora; I think all the publicity could increase their chance to build something big. But I think their motto/tagline needs a serious rework (it would already help to cut out the "do-it-all"):<p>"The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network."

Wait, doesn't the proposed routing make it impossible to share links? If Dan has friends Mike and Sara and mike wants to say "Hey Sara look at this photo of the three of us" doesn't he end up pasting an invalid link because it contains Mike's key, not Sara's?

There's no way a typical end user is going to know how to deploy an open-source Ruby on Rails application.<p>Although I really dislike PHP, I feel like it would be more appropriate because at least some technology enthusiasts are comfortable with uploading some PHP files and running a web based installer even though they aren't programmers.<p>Edit: It's also using MongoDB, interesting.

I'd be more interested to hear about what they're actually working on. Judging by their twitter stream the only thing they've actually done is redesign their web site. 200k well spent.

Looks nice on paper. Where is the free software implementation?

Diaspora has mastered selling promises.<p>But can they build?

If this is enough details for raising $200,000 there's something seriously wrong with investors.

The farthest I go into "social networking" is Reddit and HN. That being said, why dont they, or anyone, just glue together the popular social networks in a portal-type page?<p>Flickr for photo sharing, Twitter for status updates, etc. Isn't that a <i>distributed</i> network? You might not own your data, but at least no third party owns ALL your data. I am dumbfounded by the idea of seeds, and what that is buying you. If I request a page from someone on Diaspora, whatever was in that page is now on my pc (somewhere). It has been said many times, but if you dont want it out there, dont put it out there (and this is why I dont do "social networks").<p>Someone please correct my misunderstandings