121–127 of 127 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is just plain poetic. Did you come up with that yourself ?
I'm glad it's "plain poetic" and not "plain pathetic" (as I initially read that sentence!) Thanks. Yes, it's my own.
Also, could the name be changed at all, given the attention it already received?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Th…
This is the second time in this thread (which I am kicking myself for reading) that someone has intimated that Diaspora is just a couple of Google developers away from being big. No. If Facebook was 2, 10, or 100 top-caliber Google engineers away from a serious challenge, Google would already be seriously challenging Facebook. Google is a CS-hiring force of nature.
Diaspora is meant to be a mean of decentralization, just like Wordpress. Google is a mean of centralization, just like Facebook. Diaspora founders would love to see the ubiquity of Sheeva plugs (or whatever cheap home server we could get). Google would hate it: that would mean the death of most of their online services. Only the fundamentally centralized ones, like search, would be left. Gmail, Blogger, YouTube… would mostly die. (I'm aware of the asymmetric bandwidth issue. But if Sheeva plugs are ubiquitous, bandwidth will be symmetric anyway.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Orkut is just not popular in your country. Here in Brazil it wasn't until last year that people started even knowing what Facebook/Myspace is. The social rule around here is Orkut + MSN Messenger. Unfortunately it led to a wave of "@hotmail" emails, but that's another thing.
I'm not saying Orkut isn't popular anywhere, but by any metric it's not as popular as Facebook is globally.
What I don't understand about Diaspora is why can't one guy just start hacking out his own "distributed Facebook" replacement today. No team needed (not at start.) No money needed. Use F/OS/OTS software, all the pieces are just laying there. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if there were already several people out there doing exactly this already, but without the PR splash made by Diaspora. Ok, maybe I've just answer…
In other words, $10,000 means they can work on this all summer without needing a job to support them.
So I'm wondering - should they keep this a summer project or just take a leave of absence from school and give this project their full attention? 100k is some serious seed money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 feasibl…
But Jacques, they haven't misjudged their original funding requirement - at worst, they've underestimated potential early investor/market interest in the product they are proposing to create. I do see two problems here. 1. Diaspora is now awash in money - which might go to their heads or not, but which in any case creates new, non-code responsibilities for them. $100k is not chump change, and you can't just stick it…
However, I bet that "canceling funding" may not even be possible. Most founders will transfer the money from Amazon to their bank account. Even then, a project's viability may not even be obvious for another year so I doubt chargebacks could occur.