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On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

businessweek.com

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Re: On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

#31
post #6

When it's finally released the plan is to change the name right? Diaspora sounds like horrible disease.

This. Can you picture someone telling someone about this site in a conversation? How would you even pronounce it? They need to fix this before moving on to anything else.

If you don't know how to pronounce something - you can fetch a dictionary and look it up: http://www.howjsay.com

Re: On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

#32
post #5

In other news, Business Week is two years behind. Also, what's the deal with the fake-vintage effect on the pictures? Is it their lame corporate way of attempting to be "hip"?

It's called Lomography. It's basically a trend that involves shooting photographs using old soviet cameras and expired soviet film:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=lomography&bav...

Re: On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

#33
post #29

I'm actually glad they are continuing on and fighting the stigma of the "best social network that never was". I have used Diaspora's site for a while and prefer it to Facebook and Google+. The problem is trying to maintain three separate social networks. Since most of the people I like to keep up with are on FB and G+, my use of Diaspora has slowed down over the past year or so.

What kind of people use G+? Only times I visit is when linked, and it's often some OSS-guru who has written something there but I dont ever use it, nor does anyone I know, not even remotely.

We have 50 employees in 3 offices - and have found it to be a really useful internal communication tool.

Each person has a 'private' G+ (apps) account; we share stuff, have threaded conversations, etc - it's WAY better than email for a variety of things, and all the conversations remain limited to people from our organization.

It's totally not what G+ was intended for, but it works well.

Re: On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

#34
I'm sure it has been discussed elsewhere, but does FB actually earn $5.11 per user? That's amazing to me - I rarely use the site, but even when I am on I don't recall ever clicking an ad. In fact, I don't know many people that have either.

Re: On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

#35
Does anyone else think that the name "Diaspora" is downright terrible for mass-marketing a new social network? It has a dark connotation for those who know what it means, it's a bizarre word for those who don't, and neither case is particularly "cool", at least to your average joe. And if Diaspora isn't trying to go Facebook-big, what's the point?

All that said, I'm still rooting for their core mission. Social networking deserves to be an open protocol, not a closed service.

Re: On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

#36

"They wanted to raise $10,000 to create a new kind of social network, one that lets people, not companies, own their personal data." Are Google, Facebook, Twitter users really concerned about this? I know people make a noise about privacy and data protection - but would this make you change platform?

I think they are. Just not to such a degree that they're willing to walk away from what's currently working for them or put in the extra effort to manually manage privacy settings of every update.

Frankly, when you 'fix' Facebook's privacy issues, much of what people like about it doesn't work anymore.

e.g. People love to look up and keep tabs on old friends and flames on facebook. But you can't really do that with privacy settings that hide location, history and profile pictures by default, nor with 'groups' that allow those old friends/flames to share their updates/pictures only with their current friends/flames.

Higher-privacy is almost self-defeating for a social network with Facebook-style use.

Though it can be pretty key for things like Linked-In, where updates are less frequent, you don't have overlapping levels of formality between 'contacts', privacy is more-valued in that context, etc.

Re: On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

#38
post #37

Does anyone else find this style of headline odd? I've noticed it a lot lately; mostly in the NY Times.

The NY Times has a habit of running themes of headlines for a while; I've noticed this one too. The other big one from about a year ago was the, "X is the Y, except when it's not" - they had (what seemed to me like) one article a month like that.

Re: On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

#39
post #33
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of people use G+? Only times I visit is when linked, and it's often some OSS-guru who has written something there but I dont ever use it, nor does anyone I know, not even remotely.

We have 50 employees in 3 offices - and have found it to be a really useful internal communication tool. Each person has a 'private' G+ (apps) account; we share stuff, have threaded conversations, etc - it's WAY better than email for a variety of things, and all the conversations remain limited to people from our organization. It's totally not what G+ was intended for, but it works well.

would be interesting if G+ ended up being a Yammer competitor instead of a Facebook competitor.

Re: On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

#40
post #33
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of people use G+? Only times I visit is when linked, and it's often some OSS-guru who has written something there but I dont ever use it, nor does anyone I know, not even remotely.

We have 50 employees in 3 offices - and have found it to be a really useful internal communication tool. Each person has a 'private' G+ (apps) account; we share stuff, have threaded conversations, etc - it's WAY better than email for a variety of things, and all the conversations remain limited to people from our organization. It's totally not what G+ was intended for, but it works well.

Do you trust G+ enough for that? It doesn't encrypt your data.
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