31–40 of 55 posts
I'm not concerned so much with the publicity and the undeserved donations. The article does bring up a good point about having these "seeds" serve their own mini social networks. I don't see how the average user will plan on taking up this task.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If I were the Diaspora team, I'd print out every piece of negative press and post it up on the wall in front of me. Then I'd make a pot of coffee and get to coding, using my "bad press" wall as my motivation to beat the hell out of the naysayers with a fantastic product a few months down the road. They're too busy making flyers: http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/04/24/awesome-flyers-are-he...
Surely it's relevant to point out that those are from a month ago, during their fundraising push?
On their blog they say "We think a project focused getting something out there should be priority #1." Their priority #1 was fundraising and talking to the press.
I don't know about the merits of or prospects for Diaspora one way or the other but I have dealt with founders of every stripe for years and understand how people can get carried where money is involved. If a nascent founder group raised $170K from hundreds or thousands of small and unsophisticated investors by traditional means (i.e., by offering them stock in the company in exchange for their small investments), an…
While you raise a legitimate point, I think you discount the basic fact that, on balance, most individuals behave in a trustworthy manner. Society depends on this fact. We trust people to drive cars, and not intentionally run people down. Stores trust that most individuals will not shoplift. Will there eventually be a large scale case of someone untrustworthy duping people via crowdsourcing? Probably. Does that mean…
I don't know about the merits of or prospects for Diaspora one way or the other but I have dealt with founders of every stripe for years and understand how people can get carried where money is involved. If a nascent founder group raised $170K from hundreds or thousands of small and unsophisticated investors by traditional means (i.e., by offering them stock in the company in exchange for their small investments), an…
That you consider trust a genetic weakness is more than a little sad. There will be problems but there have already been fantastic projects that wouldn't have happened any other way.
The question is that is the average case worth the cons? Is the investment going to work out where they are held liable if they fail to deliver anything within x time? How can we dictate what is valuable and not deliveries.
With investors you know who you answer to. Here... not really. The risk is sort of both ways, but one of the two has been eliminated with the donation model.
I don't know about the merits of or prospects for Diaspora one way or the other but I have dealt with founders of every stripe for years and understand how people can get carried where money is involved. If a nascent founder group raised $170K from hundreds or thousands of small and unsophisticated investors by traditional means (i.e., by offering them stock in the company in exchange for their small investments), an…
If we could only channel all the pointless effort that went into writing this article, and others like it, into some way to contribute to projects like Diaspora, we could actually accomplish a lot.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood...
Also, it used to be that facebook was only used by the savvy folks. Now my grandmother has a facebook account.
If they made a one-click installer that ran on my iMac and automatically discovered all of my media, then configured it into a personal web server, then allowed me to friend people via email, I'd probably love it. I might even pay for it.
They [Diaspora] offer anyone who donates $2,000 or more a brand new computer specifically "configured" to host Diaspora. Again, it had better at least be a Mac Mini, because I'm having a hard time coming up with any reason that a server for this sole purpose should cost so much money. That's such a bizarre criticism. It's a donation. The server is a thank you gift for your donation. It's not supposed to match that co…
That is one highly negative, pessimistic viewpoint, but I have to agree that he does have some valid points. I can't see that many people will have the technical skill to install Diaspora. They don't know what a server is and think that the internet is somehow magically inside their computer. Unless Diaspora finds some way to make running the server extremely simple people won't adopt it. Also they would have to educ…
Each server is single-profile? If so, I agree that that's a terrible design. I'd assumed that it was more jabber-like in that anyone could start a server, rather than having to have one.
Honestly, I am assuming one goal will be to make it flexible. And a second goal and major dev effort (or maybe even a plea for help) will be to make it so a child can use it effectively.
Basically, this sums up to two things criticized: 1) the decentralized architecture: people won't install servers 2) not concrete enough: they only pile buzzwords and money for now. See also the 37signals criticism http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2330-diasporas-curse While I mostly agree with (2) I think that we can't criticise (1) based on the current situation on the web because the whole innovation -- if it happens…
I'd rather say "if there is a perceived need". The actual need is there for quite some time. The hard part is to collectively realize that.