Diaspora: One Month In

Glad to see an update from them—sounds like they're doing work. They've got a lot more to do in the months ahead, and I'm looking forward to following along.<p>As an aside, it's interesting to see how similar their message passing protocol is to one I'm beginning to plan out, though for a completely different application. Kinda like a "push to origin; fetch from origin" (from git).<p>EDIT: And hmm, every time Diaspora comes up, people start to say something about a "hype cycle" or something. I don't really know what that is, but it's rather obnoxious.<p>How about we don't take every mention of Diaspora as an invitation to count the ways they're sure to fail; because of the hypecycle or motorhyper or the gnarly-toothed funderrazer…etc.<p>To me, this is an interesting update about a curious project. Keep it going!

So, if I'm reading this right, the servers will be totally distributed?<p>I don't care about a Facebook replacement so much as a totally distributed file-sharing system where trust and recommendations are based on my real-life friends. It seems like that could happen with this. Also, I think file-sharing is a great hook for the everyday Joe. And it's somewhere Facebook can't easily go.

I actually like this refreshing new approach to writing open source software: keep it closed for several months &#38; code like madmen. If they can get UX people involved in the closed stage we might even see an open source product with an elegant ui for once!

It's disappointing to me to see them choose regular HTTP for communication. I think XMPP PubSub or just regular XMPP messages would work better, and you could use the existing federated jabber networks. With this, they are probably going to run into NAT traversal issues, etc.

Despite these guys' good intentions, I'd actually place my bet on an unfunded startup in this space over these guys who have been put through the hype cycle before they were ready.

What I'd really like to know is: what are these guys doing with the 200 grand people pledged? Is it just paying their rent in SF or what?

What I want to see: DRM for the people! Incorporate White Box Cryptography and the whole suite of tricks so that users can share certain info then unshare it. It wouldn't have to be perfect to be of tremendous benefit to many. (Girlfriend revenge sites won't be thrilled.)

What is the nature of their relationship with Pivotal? Anyone know?

Happy to see them working with Pivotal, that gives me a lot more confidence in them. They're working with top notch mentors.

I don't think this will catch on. Diaspora is too hard for people to say... ;)

If you step back from the "hype", not to directly oppose the many views present on this board, and analyze their statements, it appears they have more reasons to fail than succeed. The most worrying thing I see is their reliance on pivotal labs. They mention it in passing, but it would appear that the 4 founders of diaspora have very little technical knowledge and have outsourced the majority of their code. They are relying on someone else to do the most fundamental part of their startup and that, in and of itself, is extremely worrisome.

Anyone else turn HD on and look at the URLs? <a href="http://washington.joindiaspora.com/" rel="nofollow">http://washington.joindiaspora.com/</a> et al. I've been trying to create an account without luck, but they're running the app in the development environment so I've seen a lot of in depth back traces and things like that. They're using Rails 3 (beta 4), Thin and EventMachine's async features, Mongo/MongoMapper, Devise, and Warden.

Is that asterisk part of their logo? It's really distracting. I spent a good few moments looking for a footnote, until it dawned on me that it was just a visual gimmick.<p>So instead of hearing about their progress, I'm scanning their footer. I say change the logo, because it's first thing on every page. Thus an awesome distractor for whatever they want to tell.

I think it will be really interesting to see if they do the security correctly. If my entire network wants to remain anonymous to each other then that needs to be supported. If I want to create a separate public persona - I should be able to do that too.<p>All communication between nodes should be really hard to intercept/fake and should be strongly encrypted, minimal logs should be stored and all content should be strongly encrypted on disk. I'm sure there are those here that could tell us what that might look like from an implementation standpoint and I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts.<p>People are already comfortable with this mode of communication and we can make the world just a little better place if this new platform for communication was really secure by default and worked not only for the average internet user posting pictures of their cat but also the occasional government dissident organizing a protest.

An interesting note is that Pivotal Lab's VP of Technology, Ian McFarland (@imf), was Friendster's Chief Architect. Ian is one of the nicest people in the SF startup scene, and can share the experience of Friendster's growth, pain, and subsequent downfall.

What just happened in the message passing demo?

Looks interesting. I really hope they try to change it up completely from 'the facebook model', while still including essential features - personally I'd like to see more emphasis on the virality (yes, virality!) of groups.<p>These guys seem pretty smart, energetic, and optimistic. Anything that breaks the status quo is good.<p>However, they could have used some screen capture for the demo ... It wasn't entirely clear to me what was going on there.

They're focussing on features, not benefits.

One more thing I don't really understand -- what will Diaspora offer that other similar projects, already implemented don't already have? I'm talking the likes of Appleseed, PeerBook, PeerSoN, OneSocialWeb and Peerouette...

congrats on the success - good to hear you're on track, and I'm excited to try logging in!<p>how can average people like me help out?

... so when you post a message, it's like sending 300-400 messages to up to 300-400 servers?<p>Uh, yeah, that'll scale.

What language are they using?

It looks more like a Twitter replacement rather than a Facebook.

Im excited to try it out.

Made me think about Web 3.0 possible definition - websites connected