What's new with Diaspora?

Last activity on its Twitter account was a month ago: http://twitter.com/#!/joindiaspora

I got an invite a few months ago and tried it out. It was pretty amazingly rough for how long they'd been working on it. I did check out the source and was... not impressed.

Everyone laughed because they released it way too early without proper security mechanisms in place.

At least they have the money...

Did they run out of taco money?

Any other similar projects that get more traction maybe? Diaspora has turned out to be a failure, probably we should forget it (oh wait, already done), and move on.

I donated immediately, signed up as soon as they went active (even though I don't do social networks), and never went back. I wanted them to succeed, but I think one has to be fairly honest with themselves and acknowledge that Facebook is not likely to go the way of MySpace. I will be surprised if Facebook undergoes the same sort of churn in usership that we traditionally thought was inevitable for all sites and services.

Facebook reached critical mass and now the majority of the people who keep them going are the same majority that don't see what all the fuss about HD is, don't want to buy a computer more than once per decade, are still satisfied with WoW, and think the current console generation is just fine as it is for another five or ten years.

In other words, they are people with minimal demands, needs, and expectations. They're happy with what they have now and aren't likely to move to the next big thing, like the rest of us always have.

Diaspora always had a significant uphill fight. Maybe they can use the project to bootstrap another effort in another arena at some point, but I think this is all a big effort to stand on principal. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Principal is important. It's just that principal isn't going to displace the reigning king. We will never ever see Diaspora Connect fueling the "likes" and "forums" of the web, everywhere you turn. And, unlike other services, social networking is one that really does necessitate a critical mass.

I was surprised by how much support they got from the tech community, when often we bitch and moan about "NIH"-syndrome. Diaspora was classic NIH. There were and are dozens of social networking open source projects which were already fairly mature, secure, and had infrastructure. Spending the raised money adding the decentralized/federated aspects which so enthralled the supporters early on would have been a strong approach to take - helping an established community, not reinventing wheels (which seem to have been reinvented rather poorly in some cases), and generally getting much further ahead than they are now.

A primary problem I see with that approach would have been deciding which to use in the first place, which may have been seen as taking a 'kingmaker' attitude towards existing projects ("we're gonna bless you with a lot of money and attention") (though that's probably reading a bit more in to it than it merits).

Also, the decision process would have required a lot of code review of existing projects to determine which ones were solid (well-architected, easy to modify, well-documented, secure, etc). to begin with. This takes a lot of time and effort, though a submissions process or contest could have been set up to help make that more efficient.

Possibly going further, developing a federation model alone, then using the money to work with a variety of the top open source social network projects to integrate in to the newly developed model would have been a possibly stronger approach. They're not limiting things to one project, and the value is more quickly spread around to a multitude of projects, and therefore users, regardless of platform. Not everyone likes or uses Rails, or PHP, or .Net, or Python, or whatever), but everyone can use RSS, OAuth and other common standards.

Diaspora had a chance to have a huge impact on the social networking scene, and blew it. Obviously that's from my perspective. They still have the opp of putting out a nice Rails-based social network, but I don't think (given the current state and pace) it'll ever be much more than that.

All the process was faulty. Kickstarter is to fund projects but in the case of software the best thing is to show a prototype before being funded.

I registered on a node out of curiosity but it lacked a lot of features. I am happy with Facebook.

I sit next to them at the Pivotal Labs offices. I know their still pounding away, but not sure what they're doing specifically. I'll mention this post to them on Monday.