The Diaspora team published their financials awhile back. They weren't insane; they spent on some stuff I thought was silly, but they also paid themselves a pittance. The easy snark to supply here would be to say "what happened to the $200k", but that's easy to shoot down.
The reason you shouldn't give these people money is that they are very unlikely to succeed, and none of their published strategy makes a particularly compelling case for how this tiny team is going to make a dent in a space that Google and Apple are having trouble securing traction in.
One could make the observation that Diaspora is clearly a labor of love, and that to the extent that it is going to be important, it's going to be important with or without your money.
I think the lack of delivered milestones and need for more money indicates that this team with the current vision will likely always need more money to deliver "the vision".
I think of the group that got pissed off at the Twitter client announcement months back and went out and built http://rstat.us in a weekend (a very rough deployed prototype).
Since then they have been hacking on it making it nicer and nicer to use. It is actually a really compelling replacement for Twitter; just without your social circles yet.
A project like Diaspora, with the charter that it has "take on Facebook" is too big to try and fund without a benevolent dictator at the helm, executing a singular vision.
That project either needs to be driven by the community as an open source project (again, with a singular dictator driving it) or it needs to be rolled up into a tight company vision with a first round of funding to get a deployment up and running with a wall, photos and messages and then move on from there.
I was annoyed to see the lack of updates on their product page and so many annoyed/angry donatees pissed off with the lack of updates.
More money isn't going to fix this. I am almost certain I could give them $500k and in a year and a half be here again with a rewritten back end and a request for "just a little more funding".
Ooh, rstat.us implements the OStatus protocol, so it interoperates with identi.ca. Good stuff!
The latest status.net release (the software behind identi.ca) looks an awful lot like Google+ or facebook, as opposed to previous versions' more specific Twitter-targeted style. After the #nymwars debacle on G+, I'm thinking perhaps identi.ca is the place to be, after all.
Your comment reminds me of a discussion I've had regarding hybrid vehicles. The argument against hybrid vehicles, the Prius in that case, was that for less money a more efficient vehicle (to operate and manufacture), such as a Honda Civic, could be purchased. The conclusion was therefore: it was a waste of money to pay for a Toyota Prius (the further conclusion was that the primary or sole rationale for purchasing a Prius was vanity). My argument was that by purchasing the Prius you would not be making a wise short-term personal financial decision, but you would be supporting the fledgling hybrid industry. The result would then be a faster growth cycle of the hybrid industry, decreasing costs and promotion of the industry beyond just the Prius line, affecting greater efficiency across multiple manufacturers and models.
If your goal is to support the open standards based social networking industry, financial support for Diaspora may not result in Diaspora becoming a credible Facebook competitor, but it will assist in the longer term development of open standards based social networking.
That's a debate over the maximum potential efficiency of hybrid vs. combustion engines, not whether something is a wise short-term personal financial decision.
This push for donations would have worked better if the team would have given the community a clear picture of what they've created so far -- and what they intend to do moving forward.
You have to create a story to survive. This is not a story -- it's not even really altogether clear. Diaspora just isn't "getting it". They had the spotlight and they've continued to drop the marketing ball every step of the way.
I hope some people see fit to contribute. But without creating something where I see value -- either in the people or the product, I'm gonna go buy some more iPhone games.
none of their published strategy makes a particularly compelling case
I find this to be one of their biggest running problems. I'm not one of those people who thinks highly detailed specs are needed before building a project like this (obviously, look at my own project). But from the beginning, before they started asking for money, they should have really emphasized their technical and philosophical approach, and how it differed from the dozens of projects that preceded them.
Share the love?? Good god, children, please give me more to go on than that. Where will my hard-earned money go to? Given your code output, I'd rather my cash didn't end up feeding you guys -- plenty of people work day jobs while working on their startup dreams, and there's no reason why you four can't.
Please, please -- never ask for money without delivering something that people feel is worth paying for. It might bring you in a few bucks now, but you are likely to lose goodwill and build an image of desperation.
Take my advice -- find real jobs, and let the community build Diaspora* by itself if it wants to. I don't mean to be harsh, but your skills are not essential to the project. Know when to cut loose -- you can still be involved with your beloved codebase, but for heaven's sake, get a real job before you all starve!
I have yet to figure out how Diaspora couldn't reliably, quickly, and cheaply be implemented on top of XMPP (with maybe a protocol extension for rich profiles).
It's ultimately about delivering bits over the network and we have solved that problem and implemented our solution in free software already.
XMPP allows for friends, distributed registration, link-local access, basic profiles, broadcasts, multimedia, and extensibility to add app-specific goodies.
Diaspora only serves to acknowledge that Facebook is necessary, when what we should be doing is using existing tech to show it isn't.
This is the reason why I could never understand why Google seemed intent on promoting Wave as a fancier version of email or why they focused so much on the tech demo UI.
Under the hood, Wave was a federated XMPP network with privacy controls and the ability to move arbitrary data around. It had all the underpinnings not of an email killer, but of a distributed social network.
I was really excited about the potential of the project at the time, and came to be incredibly disheartened by the way nobody seemed to realize that the fancy placeholder UI wasn't where the actual interesting technology was.
ETA:
OneSocialWeb was another project predating Diaspora that was a distributed social network built on top of XMPP:
If only the marketing of Diaspora could have been combined with the technical details of OneSocialWeb.
Facebook is great because it "gets" what average folks want and need. It being centralized is a huge boon and while a few folks bitch about their privacy, very few people actually care. That isn't to say privacy concerns aren't legitimate - they are - but I know most of my peers just want to see pictures and read up on the latest news. Facebook is dead simple to use, requires nothing to get started, and has inertia. It won.
Many people on this site idolize Steve Jobs, so do what he would do:
1. Acknowledge that Facebook won its game
2. Start playing a different game.
You're spot on about Wave. Wave had the potential to be the next wave of communication (ugh), and they set their sights on probably the one standard that will never be disrupted, instead of trying to disrupt a relatively new segment. Wave should have been a social collaboration platform. I know that all I use Facebook for is communicating with members of my co-op, and we all could have easily moved our house business over. Instead, they blew it and we use Facebook for organization, scheduling, and collaboration.
The new Buddycloud web client is basically that taken "to the max". You log in with your XMPP account, the Buddycloud channel server handles the channel pubsub, and the rest is plain XMPP federation.
If you're interested in XMPP-federated social networks, check out http://buddycloud.com/
Wow, hacker news whats up? This is a cool project that despite all the "what do they have to show for it" comments, has a real product. I know because I signed up on this pod: https://diasp.org/ have any of you tried it? Seems like it works like other social networking sites, but unlike fb/g+, is open source and trying to be privacy aware.
If you don't want to give them money because you think they wasted 200K that's fine, don't do it. Really though there is a product and it seems to be working fine. Lets help them gain traction instead of bad mouthing innovators. I feel like hacker news should really support this type of product, but for some reason everyone here loves to hate it.
If you have technical concerns, that's fine, but lets help them not hinder the community with negativity. An open source facebook is exactly what the world needs now.
I don't think I've ever seen an open source project so roundly criticized for every little move they make. If people don't want to give them money then don't give them money, what's the point of all the hate?
I don't think I've ever seen an open source project so loudly pronounce what it was going to do before it did anything at all. (Not since okopipi promised to replace blue frog, anyway. Who remembers that? open source! peer to peer! how can it fail?!) Live by the buzz, die by the buzz.
I do. Surely the problem there was the non-appearance of any product, not the initial hype? Diaspora has a product.
Also as I recall Okopipi failed to materialise because somehow it had lots of enthusiasts, but nobody actually working on it. You can see work happening on diaspora on github, by the four full time coders and many others.
I think right about now would have been a great time for Diaspora to announce their first call for donations. "Hey look, we've got this great product and just need a little time and money to finish it off."
I am on the real Diaspora node (joindiaspora.org) and it is a ghost town. Accounts that were created were limited to 10 invites when I first started, and even that was turned off rather fast. 10 people is not a lot to get started. It is a ghost town now.
What is the point of supporting it further? I gave them a chance, but from my perspective they blew it.
You, I really had high hopes for this product. I signed up for the updates, waited patiently for my invite, and held out this could be a really good product. After several months of little or no updates or an invite, I lost track.
The one thing this project failed to do was capitalise on their new found popularity. Instead of seeing dollar signs, they should have holed up and did as many 24 hour hackfests as they could to get this puppy up in a few weeks - ready or not for prime time and tinker on it after that.
Instead, they ran out of money, their support has dried up, and their window to get this released, closed long ago. Not to mention, they've let a bunch more competitors into their space, namely Google.
On their site they claim 'Diaspora* is already in the top 2% of all open source projects ever.'
Kind of curious where they got these stats: All of the BSDs, the Linux kernel, all of the GNU project (gcc, GNOME, coreutils...), X11, Vim, Valgrind, LLVM, the list goes on of open source projects I think are slightly more popular.
Then again, if the number of projects is in the millions, the top 2% would place it in the top 20,000...
I don't want to donate money into what's probably going to turn into a giant hole. Diaspora had its opportunity but now it's just going to fade away into obscurity I think. I'd like to be proved wrong but I'm no way near believing in it enough to give them money.
They don't tell us how much money they need either. Or what it will be spent on. The stuff about me warmly hugging them or whatever and me being awesome comes off in a sort of weird corporate faux caring sort of way.
That's really what this post should have been about. Where the money has gone, and what more will enable them to do. In my view (an outsiders) they haven't done anything of much significance with what they already got.
They got 178k after fees/taxes. Then, they had to spend 28k on Kickstarter's "fulfillment" requirements. So they had 150 to actually work with.
They spent $114k on salaries, taxes, workers comp, etc.
8.5k on hosting and whatnot - how on earth are they using that the resources to justify that?!
8k on LUXr training. 2.5k on "Diaspora graphics/printing." Probably a waste, but you gotta spend the budget somehow, I guess.
14k on housing and travel... curious.
So the 200k turned into 114k in their pockets, 14k of hotels/flights/etc, some training and a bunch of wasted hardware.
Yeah, 29k is poverty, especially in NYC, but these are NYU students. There's plenty of financial aid to go around, but in reality, it's an overwhelmingly wealthy college. I'd be extremely surprised if their parents weren't already paying their rent/living expenses. And despite pocketing 76% of the cash, they don't have anything to show for it, and nobody's really believed they had a shot since that code release a year ago that showed they had no real technical skills to back up the project. Which probably explains the huge expenses for idle servers. I don't doubt their dedication or belief in themselves or the project, but for the love of god, stop indulging this fantasy.
>nobody's really believed they had a shot since that code release a year ago that showed they had no real technical skills to back up the project.
I really have no idea why people thought the project had a serious shot in the first place. From the get go they were talking up hugely ambitious features like video-chat while never explaining how they intended to deal with the core architecture of the project.
Simple fact of the matter is that they happened to announce when being pissed at Facebook was a common sentiment, and people expressed their anger by throwing money at these kids. It really didn't take more than a cursory look to see that the chances of something worthwhile being built, let alone taking off, were minimal.
I don't disagree. I certainly didn't throw them any money. But after that code release, even the most desperate facebook-hater knew Diaspora was nothing but well-intentioned vapor.
i think its time we admitted that nobody wants a facebook clone. it doesn't matter how distributed it is, how open it is, how shiny it is, or anything else. nobody is going to replace facebook with a product that is essentially facebook. if google can't do it, a couple kids aren't going to do it either.
the next social networking phenomenon will be something new, not a new implementation of something old, and it's time to stop trying to re-invent old things.
Not really. Diaspora already had most of its design in place, including the drag-and-drop 'Circles' feature (called Aspects in Diaspora), before Google+ was even announced.
Which is pretty ridiculous, since Appleseed had circles since 2007, and I know Diaspora was aware of Appleseed before they released any code. Also, I spoke with someone from Google about Appleseed's circles two months before Diaspora even released any code.
Not that I'm claiming that Google+ stole Appleseed's idea for circles, since they put out a presentation in June 2010 talking about social segmentation from a theoretical perspective, and even if they did, it wouldn't raise much ire, since I stole the idea from Livejournal's friends list, which it had since, what, 2000?
There was a lot of precedence for groupings of social relationships, and honestly, I was shocked at the hubris of the Diaspora* team to claim that Google had pilfered them for inspiration.
i've seen companies do a lot more with a lot less. I don't care if its NY, SF, or LA. I wouldn't donate based on what they produced with the original 200k
Unfortunately when I log on to my Diaspora I just can't help but feel it's dead. At this point if this is a viable project the community should take it and run with it, but I don't see that happening.
I appreciate their goals and hopes, but more money isn't going to make this more viable. And if it is and we just don't know, it needs to be mentioned how in the request for cash.
First, I vote to change the title to include a hint that they're asking for donations.
I admire what they're doing, and I think they should be proud of how far they've come, but I also think that Diaspora should continue by community involvement instead of by another round of soliciting donations. They probably could have done better off if they'd used a bit of that money and tried to market Diaspora a bit more, and they definitely should have at least summarized what they have produced so far, if only for people who haven't yet joined or aren't familiar.
An example of how I think they could be better marketing themselves: I like how they're publishing their financials, mentioning and linking to that from their blog post would make me feel better about donating. My 2c.
Aside from the question of funding, does anybody have any opinions on the product/code itself? I'm signed up and using it, and it seems to work fine. A decent number of my (non-tech) friends seem pretty keen to move to it. Should I be en/dis-couraging them?
This sounds an awful lot like "we don't feel like getting real jobs, so give us money to continue building a non-viable product".
Considering they blew through a couple hundred thousand and have little show for it -- I wonder how much money would now be required to create something viable? Only once they figure that out should go to the community or find investors.
> Considering they blew through a couple hundred thousand and have little show for it
They haven't slain Facebook, but they have a working product, a decent sized fanbase, a good amount of community involvement via github, and, yes, a lot of hype. For some people, that would count as quite a lot.
The reason you shouldn't give these people money is that they are very unlikely to succeed, and none of their published strategy makes a particularly compelling case for how this tiny team is going to make a dent in a space that Google and Apple are having trouble securing traction in.
One could make the observation that Diaspora is clearly a labor of love, and that to the extent that it is going to be important, it's going to be important with or without your money.