I hope they get far enough for people to use it. My objection to twitter the instant I saw it was that it required a single host/company, unlike email that can be hosted by individuals or companies and offered on any terms imaginable.
Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
31–40 of 97 posts
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#32I may be naive, but how is that any different from a traditional homepage?
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#33I was just searching for something like this yesterday. I came across DiSo (http://code.google.com/p/diso/), which at first glance appears to be somewhat stale and a bit of a protocol soup.
Anyone know if that effort is still under way? (and if there are any lessons to be learned from it?)
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#34I may be naive, but how is that any different from a traditional homepage?
I think it would have a private part that enables you to manage connections to other homepages, control what's public and private, and aggregates news from other connections.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#35I was just searching for something like this yesterday. I came across DiSo ( http://code.google.com/p/diso/ ), which at first glance appears to be somewhat stale and a bit of a protocol soup. Anyone know if that effort is still under way? (and if there are any lessons to be learned from it?)
Answering my own question here from the linked Q&A with Luis Villa: http://joindiaspora.com/2010/04/30/a-response-to-mr-villa.ht...
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also the ability to easily move your identity and inform people you have moved so they can update. I think DNS is the key here; it lets you move a server while keeping the same name.
This can be handled by 301 redirect or it can be built into the protocol. When moving a profile from one provider to another, the standard could require a response indicating the location of the profile for a minimum period of time (such as a week or a month). A standard such as this would be crawled on a frequent basis by the social network apps built on top of it, as well as the search engines. They would all updat…
I don't even trust providers enough to provide a 301 redirect, but your paranoia may vary.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#37I may be naive, but how is that any different from a traditional homepage?
I think the main difference is that there would be a "behind the scenes" component that would allow profiles on different sites to exchange information in a secure way, while supporting different levels of privacy, etc.
I think a home page will play a part by integrating into the service. Instead of having a Facebook home page, you might go to any of a number of sites that would provide an aggregated view into your portion of the social fabric. Instead of looking at peoples profile pages, you would go to their profile page on a blog or anywhere else. This, too, would integrate into the underlying service.
This is all supposition, of course...
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#38I may be naive, but how is that any different from a traditional homepage?
Well, if you look at it that way, a blog isn't any different than a traditional homepage either. :) But if not for the structure that blogs impose and the fact that non-technical people can edit them, the web would still be majority "Welcome to the Jones Family Homepage: Click to look at our vacation pictures from 2 years ago! (We can't update anymore because our kid moved out and we don't know how to change anything.)"
That aside, it looks like they're building in GPG based sharing (to limit _who_ you're actually sharing with—a more and more common problem these days) and some kind of capability to automatically publish to/subscribe from friends' nodes.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#39If facebook is stirring up this kind of sentiment then it could very well be they have a real problem on their hands.
Apparently it is ok to take your users for a ride, but only so far.
I'm pretty happy about all this, maybe there will be a serious push back against all these companies that see the information they hold about their users as their 'product'.
What's next, distributed search engines?
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#40Meh.
I don't think software people understand just how disinclined a non-software person is to do anything requiring configuring serverside stuff.
Even torrents, where clients have essentially become good enough that all you have to do is install them, most people get a friend that has some understanding of computers to set them up for them.
The cloud is really a better model if you want to achieve widespread adoption, and what is the point of a social network without people.