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Diaspora breaks $100k and all of Kickstarter's records

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Re: Diaspora breaks $100k and all of Kickstarter's records

#31

Post by andymoe »

jacquesm wrote: post #13

If they keep this up they'll cross a million bucks in the next 18 days. I'd start to feel a little uncomfortable if I were them by now, $10K is fine, but a million is a serious responsibility, even if it was gathered as small change. The surprising thing to me is how many people pledge fairly large amounts.

100k will give them more time to work on this comfortably after the initial release. It's an ambitious project and 100k is still chump change - they should raise as much as possible now. Maybe they won't need to ever take VC funding later on.

Re: Diaspora breaks $100k and all of Kickstarter's records

#32

Post by natrius »

andreyf wrote: post #16
bcardarella wrote: post #7

This is going to be the most overhyped and underwhelming web project ever. This entire group looks like they have vaporware written all over them.

Well, if nothing else, this is certainly proof of an innovative fundraising strategy. Why sell equity in your company when you can appeal to masses of tiny investors with a "battling evil" story? I don't think Facebook has anything to worry about from a product perspective, but from a PR perspective, this shows that a lot of people hate them enough to put money down.

This isn't trivially reproducible.

Re: Diaspora breaks $100k and all of Kickstarter's records

#33

Post by bjplink »

Kilimanjaro wrote: post #11

To the naysayers, even if they don't deliver, this undoubtedly proves there is place for a facebook competitor. And lots of people with money to back it up. To facebook, you just jumped the shark. Perhaps you will never die, but your days are counted as king of the social web.

All this proves is that a bunch of nerds got caught up in an open source telethon and gave some money. I highly doubt anyone at Facebook gives a damn... especially if they've watched the "pitch" video in which these guys come off like a bunch of 18 year old goofballs.

Re: Diaspora breaks $100k and all of Kickstarter's records

#34

Post by jeebusroxors »

DLarsen wrote: post #5

While I haven't followed this story all that closely, what makes people so confident that this particular project will have legs? From a quick glance at the description of their effort, I wonder whether this will really be viable. My mom doesn't use FB for any other reason than that it's the most convenient way to send messages and pictures to friends. For her to move to anything else, it has to be easier. Try explai…

I'm assuming this is the only "Facebook killer" that has been covered in the NYT? There has also been a bit of scrutiny of Facebook in the media.

I also suspect people are donating to the money, or the publicity of the donations and not the actual project - if that makes any sense at all.

Re: Diaspora breaks $100k and all of Kickstarter's records

#35

Post by jacquesm »

mrduncan wrote: post #26
jacquesm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't over until the fat lady sings. But if I were them I'd shut down the pledge site now, thank everyone and say that if after the launch they feel they need more funding they'll do a second round.

There really isn't any motivation to shut it down now though as far as I can tell. It seems like they're getting money with essentially no strings attached - might as well get it now while it's easy to get.

That's true. But they would come over a lot more credible (at least to me, that may be different for others). I you've misjudged your initial funding requirement by more than 10:1 you are already showing that you've done something wrong, so since they've received what they said they needed the logical next step would be to put up some proof they can deliver.

Like that expectations stay within the realm of the feasible.

On another note, this funding round is feeding off the facebook name recognition, not on the track record of these people.

Everybody loves an underdog.

Re: Diaspora breaks $100k and all of Kickstarter's records

#36

Post by milod »

bcardarella wrote: post #7

This is going to be the most overhyped and underwhelming web project ever. This entire group looks like they have vaporware written all over them.

Is anyone else mildly depressed by the inequality between money raised and reality here?

It's great that these guys are raising money, I'm all for it. They should take what they can get. But, what about all the brilliant open source projects out there, that people are actually enjoying and using today, not sponsored by large organizations that accept donations from the community. I'm willing to bet that _none_ of them have raised even close to this much money. It saddens me that society is more willing to financially support a statement than something actually useful and real.

Perhaps this turn of events was destined to happen eventually and these lucky guys hit the media jackpot. I still can't be happy about it.

Re: Diaspora breaks $100k and all of Kickstarter's records

#37

Post by UnknownSource »

I was personally going to donate to this project, but unfortunately, there seems to be little evidence that these guys actually are competent coders (not even code samples from their uni). So I fear that people are paying money simply because they hate Facebook, and that it may be mostly wasted.

I'd love to see this happen, but I do feel that there is a high risk that the end product may be garbage. So I urge people who want to donate to learn more about the boys first (a computer science degree doesn't necessarily guarantee that they even know basics such as proper multithreading or have ever touched sockets).

Re: Diaspora breaks $100k and all of Kickstarter's records

#38

Post by jacquesm »

bjplink wrote: post #33
Kilimanjaro wrote: post #11

To the naysayers, even if they don't deliver, this undoubtedly proves there is place for a facebook competitor. And lots of people with money to back it up. To facebook, you just jumped the shark. Perhaps you will never die, but your days are counted as king of the social web.

All this proves is that a bunch of nerds got caught up in an open source telethon and gave some money. I highly doubt anyone at Facebook gives a damn... especially if they've watched the "pitch" video in which these guys come off like a bunch of 18 year old goofballs.

Enough people are pledging different stuff besides just money to give them a serious amount of resources to use, all it takes is for one or two experienced systems architects from the big G, skype or some other project to hop on board and they're going to get a lot more legs. Diasporas biggest negative asset at this point is the egos of the founders, judging by their videos. But then again, who wasn't cocky at 18.

They're by no means a contender right now in the eyes of the tech world, but if I were Zuckerberg I'd take notice of what happens when you fuck people over often enough and what kind of grass roots resistance can materialize out of thin air.

There seems to be a limit to consumer patience when it comes to things like this and that makes me happy.

All FB has to do to take the wind out of diaspora's sails is to announce they got the message and that they'll default all privacy settings to 'opt-in' from now on and apologize.

I doubt that will happen though.

Re: Diaspora breaks $100k and all of Kickstarter's records

#39

Post by hyperbovine »

andreyf wrote: post #20

This seems like a great opportunity for Google to "donate" some senior talent to the project, blow this up into a fully functioning platform (optionally backed up on Google's servers), and one-punch KO Facebook.

and one-punch KO Facebook

Wha?

A bunch of geeks living in the echo chamber are pissed about a privacy issue, so they all cruise over to a geeky website, and toss in $20 of their geek-inflated disposable income, to a vaporware project whose popularity is mostly due to politics. Meanwhile, in the time it took me to write this, ten million people logged in to Facebook.

Methinks a little perspective is in order here.

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