Google+ "inspired" by diaspora?

"Certainly a lot of hackers have done much more with much less." +1 insightful.

At the risk of repeating myself, the Diaspora team had a great opportunity to do something more than put out rails code. With that money, they could have done the hard work of coordinating real world meetings with various existing projects to hash out federation issues, schema differences, etc., and been able to get dozens of indie social networks to agree on a common standard.

Yes, it's a pipe dream, but there are already dozens of decent SN platforms out there - we didn't need one more, we needed a way to make them all talk and exchange appropriate data. The big thing holding back many of them seems to be time/effort to coordinate the cooperation. There may be some NIH in there too, but Diaspora was just more one contribution to the NIH pile.

Much thought/work had already gone in to the problem space - using the $200k to help unite that previous work would have been far more productive than another Rails app.

I agree also. I also think we all need to appreciate the fact that 99% of the world uses Facebook BECAUSE it is a agnostic platform. I have a Gmail account - most of friends "lay persons" in the tech world - use Yahoo or Hotmail, and sure, some use Gmail. They check Facebook on their mobiles and website daily - they don't particularly care about [or even know really] the "wars of technology companies"

Facebook works. All their friends exist on it - it does everything they could possibly want it to do "connect to their friends". In my mind - it's "Google and Bing" all over. Bing works and is arguably just as good as Google these days yet everyone continues to use Google.

Google+ - great for technology people who want to "control their data". Most of my friends don't even understand what "exporting data for portability" even means. They use Facebook, see their friends posts, upload photos, check-in to places and they love that.

It's going to take a LOT MORE "innovation" to move them across to another platform because "it's new, pretty and contains some nifty features that Facebook already contains or will contain in the next 3 months of 'lock-down' in response to Google+". I'm not on Google+ [outrageous request for invite via my profile :D] - but I just can't see my friends moving to it - particularly when they don't even login to Google anyway when they are searching.

Facebook will "win" in my mind - because they are agnostic to email and that's where your "connections" lie and the reason you use Google "mostly" [outrageous generalization again] is because you host your email on Gmail.

are there any products that don't take features from other products?

The interesting thing about disapora was that it was meant to be federated, like wave, and email. Plus is not federated at all.

Therefore they are only similar in that they have targeted people's areas of displeasure regarding facebook, and this is hardly remarkable. They were both built specifically to compete with facebook, so this whole discussion is almost tautological.