Google+ "inspired" by diaspora? • Hacker News Board

Re: Google+ "inspired" by diaspora?

#21

Post by rowanseymour » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 1:58 PM UTC

sebbi wrote: post #6

jaysonelliot wrote: post #2

I've never been too bothered, as a user, when one product "borrows" a great feature from another, especially if they manage to deliver a better experience. I've had high hopes for Diaspora. Gave them cash when they were on Kickstarter. Tried hosting my own Diaspora server. Waited for the devs and the community to do something with the $200,000 they raised. Certainly a lot of hackers have done much more with much less…

Why is facebook "deeply flawed"? @1. you can do that on Facebook, too ... they even have "circles" there, too @2. facebook is the champion of playing nice with other sites, just look around you ... everything is facebook nowadays @3. facebook borrowed a lot and you can filter everything everywhere. So maybe their UI isn't as clean as Google+ and they lack a great video chat, but other than that, why should anyone swi…

@2 By "playing nice" do you mean taking over? Can I export any of the information I put into Facebook into different sites? Can I use my Facebook email address with a different client?

Re: Google+ "inspired" by diaspora?

#22

Post by apinstein » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 2:11 PM UTC

donall wrote: post #8

I assumed the concept had come from Google's own research, which I first saw a year ago in this slide deck: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ... According to Wikipedia, Diaspora was initially funded in April 2010 and a developer preview was released in September 2010. The Google slide deck was published in July 2010, so presumably this is an idea they had been kicking around for a while bef…

I agree. I saw the Google+ circles and immediately thought of that preso. Makes me very excited to try Google+, too bad I can't get in!

Re: Google+ "inspired" by diaspora?

#23

Post by dspace » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 2:11 PM UTC

donall wrote: post #8

I assumed the concept had come from Google's own research, which I first saw a year ago in this slide deck: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ... According to Wikipedia, Diaspora was initially funded in April 2010 and a developer preview was released in September 2010. The Google slide deck was published in July 2010, so presumably this is an idea they had been kicking around for a while bef…

This is exactly what I was thinking, since I saw that presentation last year. It could be that the Diaspora guys were inspired by the Google research, and not the other way around. It just took Google longer to push it out to a product.

Re: Google+ "inspired" by diaspora?

#24

Post by dspace » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 2:16 PM UTC

JonnieCache wrote: post #19

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.

Right, Circles only solves the sharing problem. Diaspora has a much larger ambition. Federation allows for communication between instances that are owned and operated by different people, but it also preserves your privacy better. Google wants all your data. However, you can install Diaspora on a home computer so absolutely no one gets your data except what you share.

Re: Google+ "inspired" by diaspora?

#25

Post by bad_user » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 2:16 PM UTC

sebbi wrote: post #6

jaysonelliot wrote: post #2

I've never been too bothered, as a user, when one product "borrows" a great feature from another, especially if they manage to deliver a better experience. I've had high hopes for Diaspora. Gave them cash when they were on Kickstarter. Tried hosting my own Diaspora server. Waited for the devs and the community to do something with the $200,000 they raised. Certainly a lot of hackers have done much more with much less…

Why is facebook "deeply flawed"? @1. you can do that on Facebook, too ... they even have "circles" there, too @2. facebook is the champion of playing nice with other sites, just look around you ... everything is facebook nowadays @3. facebook borrowed a lot and you can filter everything everywhere. So maybe their UI isn't as clean as Google+ and they lack a great video chat, but other than that, why should anyone swi…

     Google+ is coming to late to a party
     that started years ago

That maybe so, but the party was well underway when Facebook arrived.

I'm also not sure what problem Facebook (or social networks) solve, that email, your IM account and your phone with its contacts list do not.

Where I live most Internet users are also users of Yahoo's IM. I've been reading the status messages of my friends, interacted with them, getting back in touch and all that - for years before Facebook became popular. Yahoo's IM is still the most popular form of communication between my friends, although all of them are also on Facebook.

My current IM account is 11 years old, my mobile phone number 10 years old, my email account is newer since I migrated to my own domain and my name is searchable on Google -- every one of my acquaintances I ever had know how to get in touch with me and do so.

And that's Facebook's flaw; Facebook was once cool, now it is getting more popular because it is popular; but a good communication medium it ain't

Re: Google+ "inspired" by diaspora?

#26

Post by inmygarage » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 2:38 PM UTC

It's unfair to say that Google copied Diaspora. When you're making a social product there are only so many ways you can style a text entry box and only so many words for "bundles of people". The feature set across most social products has at least some overlap.

Blatant copying looks more like the Plurk v. Microsoft situation from December 2009: http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/14/microsoft-plurk-ripoff/.

Pixel for pixel copying = lame, feature overlap = necessary.

Re: Google+ "inspired" by diaspora?

#27

Post by pgroves » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 2:38 PM UTC

The Appleseed Project also has had the idea of Aspects/Circles for a while now. They call them......'Circles.'

Re: Google+ "inspired" by diaspora?

#28

Post by michaelchisari » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 2:42 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #11

jaysonelliot wrote: post #2

I've never been too bothered, as a user, when one product "borrows" a great feature from another, especially if they manage to deliver a better experience. I've had high hopes for Diaspora. Gave them cash when they were on Kickstarter. Tried hosting my own Diaspora server. Waited for the devs and the community to do something with the $200,000 they raised. Certainly a lot of hackers have done much more with much less…

"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…

they could have done the hard work of coordinating real world meetings with various existing projects to hash out federation issues

Actually, StatusNet did a great job with that, organizing the Federated Social Web Summit in Portland last summer. I was there (Appleseed), so was OneSocialWeb, Gnu Social, Diaspora. It was good times.

Re: Google+ "inspired" by diaspora?

#29

Post by michaelchisari » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 2:45 PM UTC

No disrespect to Diaspora, but they hadn't really come up with anything new, especially nothing that a company like Google would have to look towards them for inspiration. Livejournal had friends lists for a decade, plenty of other projects were looking to federate social networking (Appleseed, OneSocialWeb, FOAF, etc). I think this is giving way too much credit to Diaspora, whose real innovation it seems was in the marketing/crowdsourced funding space.

Re: Google+ "inspired" by diaspora?

#30

Post by orenmazor » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 2:49 PM UTC

the future of diaspora is just NOW in doubt? not pretty much every single day since it was announced?

I have immense respect for the founders of the diaspora project. they were at the right place and at the right time to get some kickass funding and publicity, but thats basically it. don't get me wrong. the idea is great, and I'd love to see a proper competitor to facebook from the community.

and I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this.