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Diaspora Developer Release

joindiaspora.com

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Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#111

Post by K3G »

weixiyen wrote: post #89
Vishnevskiy wrote: post #26

I was kinda of expecting more with a funding, an office, and a semi large team. I have personally been working with my co-founder with zero funding on a MMORPG social start-up that brings the best features of Facebook to another group of people. We have implemented real-time features through Erlang (including Chat and Streams), data collection/aggregation from games, and far more. ( http://www.guildwork.com/blog/ if…

Agreed. The UI isn't even that good. They paid a company to tell them to copy Facebook, but ghettoed it. The funding definitely went to people who were not ready for this. They had 4 developers on this, you'd expect more polish. Just feels like a regular crud app with flash sockets, won't work iPhone/iPad without a lot of tinkering. Am I being too harsh?

I agree with your criticism from a quick look.

That being said, I have no skills to bother taking a look under the hood. Could be they've done some impressive stuff underneath, and it will manifest over time?

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#112

Post by bl4k »

xelfer wrote: post #12

They really need to do something about that name. They seem to be having trouble with it themselves: http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/708e9f88a55cc3713...

The name reminds me of the holocaust. It doesn't help that the color theme of the app evokes Schindler's List.

You can bet for most non-US people that 'diaspora' reminds them of some sort of persecution their people have faced. It is also a word that is used in a lot of languages, I have friends who are Russian, Ukranian, Serbian, Lebanese, Armenian, Jordanian etc. who all refer to themselves being in the 'diaspora' (ie. persecuted people who left their homeland and are now living in the west)

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#113

Post by RK »

rubashov wrote: post #93
alanh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a lot of people, their name’s strongest connotation is Jewish persecution. To me, this is so awkward as to rule out the name for use in serious software.

> For a lot of people For New York Jews? You say it to me I think potato famines. It's a fine, catchy name with some bite. Hopefully they don't trade it in for something dumb like folksr.

When I first mentioned Diaspora to my Greek friend, the first thing he said was, "is it a social network for Greek people?"

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#114

Post by pkulak »

steveklabnik wrote: post #70
pkulak wrote: post #32

Can anyone explain to me what an "aspect" is?

It seems to be just like a 'group,' or an 'interest.' An 'aspect' of your personality that you'd like to share with others.

That's a really good idea. I post stuff to Facebook all the time about college football, but I know a lot of peole don't care about that and just want the baby pictures... and vice versa.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#115

Post by eob »

neurotech1 wrote: post #14
davidu wrote: post #3

I'm impressed and surprised that they have released code. I worried that the initial flurry of money and hype would derail them. Many projects never get this far, and for this, they deserve to be commended. They've built something and dealt with a lot of external pressure at the same time.

Apparently they spent some of the money on working with LUXr and Pivotal Labs. The best technical solution can be derailed by a poor user interface and experience. It looks like they avoided that. See earlier update for more information; http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/08/26/overdue-update.html

I just downloaded and ran the project, and to be honest, I didn't see more UX work than what could have been done in an afternoon's worth of googling around for some templates.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#116

Post by jarin »

eob wrote: post #115
neurotech1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently they spent some of the money on working with LUXr and Pivotal Labs. The best technical solution can be derailed by a poor user interface and experience. It looks like they avoided that. See earlier update for more information; http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/08/26/overdue-update.html

I just downloaded and ran the project, and to be honest, I didn't see more UX work than what could have been done in an afternoon's worth of googling around for some templates.

You obviously haven't noticed all the touches like being able to drag files into the browser to upload them (Gmail-style)

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#117

Post by pkulak »

jat850 wrote: post #4

It looks surprisingly advanced, from a screenshot perspective - more than I admit I would have given them credit for. Is there additional insight into what "aspects" are, though? It confuses me - will it confuse an ordinary user?

When you make a new account you get "home" and "work" aspects, which you can add people to individually. That actually goes a long way to making it clear.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#118

Post by dandelany »

patio11 wrote: post #52
dandelany wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like they're just releasing the source code, not taking new users for "the" Diaspora or sharing access to any kind of central database of users. It's just a ruby web app you can download and run locally (or on a web server if you're that dumb...), right? And in that case, how is this any worse than the hundreds of other bits of (unsafe, untested) social networking code floa…

how is this any worse than ... is a question which would be better to answer privately, to a security contact. Use your imagination as to what the email would likely say. This may just be a difference of philosophy, but I don't think "It isn't really a release, so nobody would be stupid enough to actually run this on a publicly accessible server." After all, consumers of The New Hotness have a lot less incentive to t…

Thanks for the response. I agree that a security page is a good, even necessary idea, it just doesn't strike me as a pressing emergency for them at the moment.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#120

Post by [deleted] »

jarin wrote: post #116
eob wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just downloaded and ran the project, and to be honest, I didn't see more UX work than what could have been done in an afternoon's worth of googling around for some templates.

You obviously haven't noticed all the touches like being able to drag files into the browser to upload them (Gmail-style)

[deleted]
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