Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Diaspora Developer Release

joindiaspora.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 202 posts

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#131

Post by Maro »

If it's true that for a social network to be successful it needs some quick growth at the beginning to have a critical mass, then Diaspora is in trouble. They're in trouble because they release non-usable alpha versions of their code, loose the buzz ("Diaspora released another version today, X works now, but it's still not good enough to replace Facebook."), and by the time they have a 1.0 version nobody's going to care.

I'm saying it might not make sense to develop software in an open-source manner whose existense relies of viral growth of users dependant on a one-off buzz generated when the 1.0 is released.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#133

Post by daleharvey »

Maro wrote: post #131

If it's true that for a social network to be successful it needs some quick growth at the beginning to have a critical mass, then Diaspora is in trouble. They're in trouble because they release non-usable alpha versions of their code, loose the buzz ("Diaspora released another version today, X works now, but it's still not good enough to replace Facebook."), and by the time they have a 1.0 version nobody's going to c…

thats a pretty big if, almost the entire customer development program is aimed towards proving that if isnt true

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#134

Post by Maro »

daleharvey wrote: post #133
Maro wrote: post #131

If it's true that for a social network to be successful it needs some quick growth at the beginning to have a critical mass, then Diaspora is in trouble. They're in trouble because they release non-usable alpha versions of their code, loose the buzz ("Diaspora released another version today, X works now, but it's still not good enough to replace Facebook."), and by the time they have a 1.0 version nobody's going to c…

thats a pretty big if, almost the entire customer development program is aimed towards proving that if isnt true

What customer development program?

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#135

Post by benlangfeld »

I'm really disappointed to see that the team has decided that instead of learning about an existing standard (XMPP) which fits the purpose perfectly, they've decided to begin defining their own protocol, which will go down the same path but with less rigour and a whole lot of wasted time. Eventually it will have to be trashed in favour of something more robust.

If that's what they've spent the last three months working on, they've had some bad advice. I thought Pivotal were all about "just get the damn thing done" and so would have encouraged them not to waste their time.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#136

Post by auxbuss »

deno wrote: post #126
jarin wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's for super-power-users, maybe in 5 years for advanced users. If you attempt to do this with either unsupported browser or on unsupported website your browser will act very non-userfriendly, like by opening dropped file. Because of this it would be foolish and dangerous to even inform the vast majority of users of this feature. From my observation their UI is just copied Facebook UI. And my issue with this is no…

If their intent is to woo Facebook users, then creating an interface familiar to Facebook users is not a bad approach.

An interface can look similar superficially, while performing completely differently at the next level.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#137

Post by daleharvey »

Maro wrote: post #134
daleharvey wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats a pretty big if, almost the entire customer development program is aimed towards proving that if isnt true

What customer development program?

Sorry, terrible wording, customer development process / methodology / idea etc.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#138

Post by daleharvey »

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)

drag and drop uploading is like 10 lines of code for the usual suspects.

Not taking anything away from the diaspora guys, I havent tried the application, just mentioning in case anyone thought drag and drop was too much of a hassle to add to their app, it can be done in a few minutes.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#139

Post by Maro »

daleharvey wrote: post #137
Maro wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What customer development program?

Sorry, terrible wording, customer development process / methodology / idea etc.

My question was, does Diaspora actually have such a process?

It seems to me their approach is to get power-users like HN folks on-board first. Conveniently, we are also the users who would run servers for our friends or do a startup that would do Diaspora hosting. But that's my point. If we keep seeing these alpha releases, it will loose the buzz, and it'll never reach critical mass / momentum. Eg. this release is so minimal, I really don't care. Tell me when it's 1.0.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#140

Post by Joeboy »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #60
logic wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm dealing with this right now, as I'm pretty interested in Diaspora's architecture. Since Fedora (13) ships with Ruby 1.8.6, it looks like I'll be building a standalone version of ruby just for this (requires Rails 3, released a couple of weeks ago, which in turn requires ruby >= 1.8.7). Rails is a perfectly good target for this, IMHO; I'm a Python guy and would have preferred Django, but that's a bikeshed as far a…

It only took me 10 or 12 minutes to get it set up and running, but I already had a mongod running on my laptop and all 5 popular rubies installed with rvm (with most gems already installed). Still, follow the readme file, and it is fairly easy.

I abandoned it at the point I was going to have to globally install specific versions of stuff from source. There might be ways to avoid that but as a ruby n00b I don't know them.
Post reply on HN