41–50 of 54 posts
Why did this need to be an open letter?
He's got a branding problem as well. 'Socknet'? And foolishmortal.net looks like pre-beta HN. Geeks sometimes don't seem to understand the power and value of word choice, or design. Smart word choice and updated design is not sufficient, but in a Web 2.0+ world, it's necessary.
Off topic: if you look at the kickstarter page for Diaspora http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p... Notice how for anyone who donates more than $5 they need to send them a CD with Diaspora on it. $25 gets them a t-shirt etc. For 6k donors, they're going to spend ~$50-100k of the $200k they raised just meeting their commitments. Not to mention a huge amount of time dealing with the logistics. E…
How do you arrive at this figure? When you purchase items like t-shirts and cd's in bulk you usually get a pretty sizable discount.
Also, founders' time, which is probably the most costly part.
Off topic: if you look at the kickstarter page for Diaspora http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p... Notice how for anyone who donates more than $5 they need to send them a CD with Diaspora on it. $25 gets them a t-shirt etc. For 6k donors, they're going to spend ~$50-100k of the $200k they raised just meeting their commitments. Not to mention a huge amount of time dealing with the logistics. E…
How do you arrive at this figure? When you purchase items like t-shirts and cd's in bulk you usually get a pretty sizable discount.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still decentralized. Not one company has access to all e-mail, as with Facebook.
Of course it is, I'm not saying you're wrong. Although usually one company has access to all your email. As far as the user is concerned it's still centralized. That is, our data is still stored in a centralized place. The protocols for these open social networks however call for decentralizing all the way to the user level, and that's not how email is (though it could be).
It's not possible for one company/person to get across all your email because you can have it somewhere else. It's not possible to store Facebook info outside of facebook.
I imageine a distributed social network being a woven fabric where some people host their own, some use their companies (think bands using their labels server), a lot of people use free ad-based services (think hotmail or yahoo diaspora). However, no one company would ever have all your data, and couldn't hold it to ransom, assuming some type of export facility is built into the design. For I can import all my emails into a different server, but I can't export all my facebook data. Once switching costs are reduced to negligible, then competition for features, usability and, yes, privacy, wins out. Same way as plenty of people decamped hotmail and yahoo for a shiny new gmail account when they had better featurs and an import facility.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why couldn't phone support be crowd-sourced as volunteers in 100's of "party-line" style chats?
Why would I pay for volunteer support?
1. You're paying for the infrastructure that the support volunteers need to do their job.
2. You receive value for it. If the answers help save you time and money, do you care what motivates the people providing them?
3. You and the volunteers are both supporting a broader effort.
There are plenty of organizations that rely on volunteers that also charge user fees to support their mission; any museum with a docents program, park guides, ushers at the symphony, schools that rely on PTA volunteers to cover unfunded positions. It's not exactly radical.
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He's definitely looking for attention here, otherwise why post an open letter ? No doubt. I stated that badly. It would have been better stated as "hadn't looked for any attention" or "hasn't looked for glory". To me he's not just serious, but also very slow. Some of us are out in the world trying to provide for ourselves and our families while tending to our passions as time allows. To me it has spoken of admirable…
You mixed up the thread :) I understand that he may have different responsibilities, but that's exactly what I mean. He starts off by talking about finding other 'stale' projects, and how he decided to do it better, on his own time, with a small group. Now, two years on, from where I'm sitting his project looks indistinguishable from the ones that he is disparaging, so effectively he is undercutting his own project.…
I'd swear there wasn't a reply link under your post at the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mixed up the thread :) I understand that he may have different responsibilities, but that's exactly what I mean. He starts off by talking about finding other 'stale' projects, and how he decided to do it better, on his own time, with a small group. Now, two years on, from where I'm sitting his project looks indistinguishable from the ones that he is disparaging, so effectively he is undercutting his own project.…
You mixed up the thread :) I'd swear there wasn't a reply link under your post at the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A dropdown box on Facebook would do, but nobody can put it there so some people decided to go with Plan B.
but nobody can put it there Except for Facebook. And, err, they did - quite a while ago :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
but nobody can put it there Except for Facebook. And, err, they did - quite a while ago :)
I don't remember the source, but "it's easy to take a reservation, the hard part is filling it." Meaning, of course, that Facebook privacy has continuously eroded, so some (myself included) have no faith that such a dropdown has any persistent effect consistent with what might be inferred by what is written on it.