Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried
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Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried
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Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried
#2He forgot the fourth curse:
"Your thirteen year-old sister will crap her pants when she's told to download a social "node" on her computer in order to tell her friends that Abercrombie is having a sale."
Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried
#3The reason people have donated so much is because they are upset with Facebook's new privacy policies.
How diaspora can succeed: do the same thing Facebook does, but fix the privacy.
How diaspora can fail: by making some pie in the sky social networking platform that will elude most non-technical people. Unfortunately, it sounds like it's going this direction.
I truly want to see Diaspora work. And it doesn't have to be complicated...at the moment, all they need is a decent social network (one that's built with the help of a graphic designer) and chances are you'll have at least one new user for everyone who donated.
Lastly, make it easy for people to move from Facebook to Diaspora. Ease of use will be the pass/fail here.
Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried
#4I think another issue is their solution to the problem is flawed. Most users don't have a desire or the ability to run their own server.
Running a basic application on a web server seems trivial to nerds, but to average users it seems impossible.
Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried
#5He forgot the fourth curse: "Your thirteen year-old sister will crap her pants when she's told to download a social "node" on her computer in order to tell her friends that Abercrombie is having a sale."
Not everyone has to run their own node. I believe the idea is that you can have people you trust run a node for you.
But you're right, for most people this will be a big hurdle.
Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried
#6A fair and completely unsurprising analysis, the spotlight is definitely on too early and I will be surprised if they survive it's hard glare. Jason's thoughts on taking money are well documented but I've always disagreed with this as an over generalisation, it depends on the people receiving the money. Certainly the scale that they're aiming at will require mountains of cash and having some early on doesn't have to mean they will get carried away.
And of course there is the fact that the story is the money, not the idea, which is the worst sign of the bunch in my opinion!
Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried
#7I think another issue is their solution to the problem is flawed. Most users don't have a desire or the ability to run their own server. Running a basic application on a web server seems trivial to nerds, but to average users it seems impossible.
Well, torrents are also rather complicated and people seem to cope with that as long as the software is usable enough. I agree that running a server that's available for 24/7 with enough bandwidth for video and images is a problem.
Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried
#8I expect what any reasonable person who just invested $170k in a group of four strangers with vague plans and no proof of concept would expect.
Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried
#9I think another issue is their solution to the problem is flawed. Most users don't have a desire or the ability to run their own server. Running a basic application on a web server seems trivial to nerds, but to average users it seems impossible.
Running a Unix machine in your pocket also seems impossible—oh wait, 100 million sold you say? You just need to unlearn what you have learned.
Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried
#10To be fair I don't think they were out to raise so much attention, just enough money that they could actually spend there summer on this vs needing alternate employment.
They could turn money down but at this stage they already have the attention and that money could fund years of an open source project instead of having to worry about supporting themselves later to if things work out.