It looks surprisingly advanced, from a screenshot perspective - more than I admit I would have given them credit for. Is there additional insight into what "aspects" are, though? It confuses me - will it confuse an ordinary user?
I'm guessing they should have just called aspects "groups". From what I can tell, they are just groups of users which you can publish particular content/updates to.
Would that be confusing to use that terminology since groups was recently a staple of facebook with a very different meaning?
Did you remember to bring enough knowledge to share with the rest of the class? What glaring issue are you referring to?
This is the problem with public disclosure: I could tell you, but it would practically write exploit code which you could point at any one of the "Try Diaspora now!" sites popping up and do very bad things. Here, let me tell you what isn't a problem: you cannot type "system('rm -rf /')" into their username field on the signup form and wipe any machine with Diaspora installed because some idiot passed untrusted user i…
There is now a security email ID you can contact: exploits@joindiaspora.com
I'm impressed and surprised that they have released code. I worried that the initial flurry of money and hype would derail them. Many projects never get this far, and for this, they deserve to be commended. They've built something and dealt with a lot of external pressure at the same time.
Apparently they spent some of the money on working with LUXr and Pivotal Labs. The best technical solution can be derailed by a poor user interface and experience. It looks like they avoided that. See earlier update for more information; http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/08/26/overdue-update.html
Actually Diaspora hasn't spent any of their money with us, (us = Pivotal,) we're just giving them space to work in, and occasional advice when they ask for it. It's been fun to have them around, and we're glad they're open-sourcing and getting feedback like this.
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 worki…
We are indeed all about being pragmatic. I think a lot of our pragmatism has rubbed off on the Diaspora folks, but do keep in mind that we're not really advising them in any formal capacity. (Other than the occasional conversation over breakfast, or when they ask about ideas.) I'm sure if you asked them about their choices, they'd be very happy to take in new ideas. Not to speak for them, but I think they're just trying to get a concept out and iterate on it. I think Ship it Squirrel would approve.
They are building social networking software which means that at some point the goal will need to be to get everyone and their mother on board. Because they built the app on Rails, they are now facing an uphill battle with distribution as there are not a lot of places that you can easily setup a Rails site. I love Rails but for this type of app, it might have helped them gain traction faster if it was built on PHP, o…
I think the obvious answer to this is a pre-built, deployable VM, something that you can fire up with an EC2 instance. Thus you don't need traditional hosting, and can get going straight away.
This is the problem with public disclosure: I could tell you, but it would practically write exploit code which you could point at any one of the "Try Diaspora now!" sites popping up and do very bad things. Here, let me tell you what isn't a problem: you cannot type "system('rm -rf /')" into their username field on the signup form and wipe any machine with Diaspora installed because some idiot passed untrusted user i…
There is now a security email ID you can contact: exploits@joindiaspora.com It's been added to the README at http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora
It looks surprisingly advanced, from a screenshot perspective - more than I admit I would have given them credit for. Is there additional insight into what "aspects" are, though? It confuses me - will it confuse an ordinary user?
I'm guessing they should have just called aspects "groups". From what I can tell, they are just groups of users which you can publish particular content/updates to.
They are building social networking software which means that at some point the goal will need to be to get everyone and their mother on board. Because they built the app on Rails, they are now facing an uphill battle with distribution as there are not a lot of places that you can easily setup a Rails site. I love Rails but for this type of app, it might have helped them gain traction faster if it was built on PHP, o…
I think the obvious answer to this is a pre-built, deployable VM, something that you can fire up with an EC2 instance. Thus you don't need traditional hosting, and can get going straight away.