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 networ…
I would HOPE that people would learn from it, and end up with a slightly better vocabulary, and be thankful for it.
On the flipside, it's NOT a commonly used word, so SEO for it (at least for the name) should be drop dead easy. A search for Diaspora should contain either a wiki link to a disambiguation page, or an article about them. That's about as good as you can hope for, SEO wise, though I obviously have to concede that the name fails the obvious pronounceability test, but as more and more of our interactions are relegated to clicks, that's becoming less of an issue than it used to be.