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Why Diaspora will win
Okay, so four CS majors get together and say, "hey, why don't we create something that is like Facebook, but with no privacy concerns?" Two weeks later, they've raised over $100K in pledges.
This could either be hyped-up vaporware (as my DLS colleague Matthew Rogers believes), or it could be something truly great. To see why, and how, it can all work out for the best, continue reading after the fold.
It's About People, First
Diaspora is not a product at this point. Matthew is, of course, correct when he points out that it isn't real as a software product.
But as something else, it is entirely real and tangible: It is a very solid embodiment of what many people feel about Facebook these days and of how passionate those feelings are.
It often seems as though everybody on the Web wants money. In one way or the other, it's true. That's not necessarily bad. However, it does mean that as users and Web surfers, we are very, very leery of giving away any of our hard earned cash.
The Diaspora team set out to raise $10,000, and has gotten over $170,000 so far. This is money from people like you and me. And for every person who did give them money, how many people agree with the project "in principle" but not enough to give them any money?
A conservative estimate would be around 100 "silent supporters" per each person who donated. So, if we have 5,226 people who actually put their money where their mouth is, that works out to roughly half a million users who've heard about the project and want to see it happen. And that's a conservative estimate, given the amount of hits I get when I currently google the project (over two million).
Okay, so what we have established so far is not technical at all but is more in the realm of noise and public relations. To recap:
1) Many people have heard about the project. 2) Many people feel strongly about it. 3) The money raised was not VC capital, rather it came from those same people.
At the very least, the four guys behind Diaspora now have the wherewithal to put up an alpha version. Some would even argue that they have too much money. In addition, the Diaspora guys say they've been contacted by many talented people who want to lend them a hand.
So, all of the elements for success are right there: the money, the people, the peer pressure, and the community. Everything is there, but everything is totally crazy and hectic, too. In fact, I was reminded of a recent Seth Godin post about how some people make their living surfing from project to project. Like Godin says:
"Talk to surfers and they'll explain that the entire sport comes down to the hunt for that blissful moment that combines three unstable elements in combination: the wave is just a little too big to handle, the board is going just a little too fast, and the ride could end at any moment."
So yes, this is one crazy ride. If these kids wipe out, though, they have a lot to lose. This is not something they will be able to live down. I know the theory that says failures are important to succeed, but I'm not the only one who thinks it's really dumb. And this is not just a regular failure with some VC capital that you burn and then say "oops."
If Diaspora never does materialize as a product, some people may claim that the whole thing was a fraud and a hoax. If Matthew's predictions were to come true and the money would be spent mainly on appletinis, I am sure that those same people who cared enough to give them money would care enough to sue them, too.
Yup -- if Diaspora does not deliver an actual application, I'm pretty sure they will get sued for fraud. So, that's the carrot and the stick right there. This is all going down in the most litigious country on Earth after all.
Now let's talk about ...
The Technology
Diaspora will be distributed; anyone can set up their own node (or "seed") on the network. This is a good thing and is actually at the heart of the project; it will not be owned by some monolithic corporation but by the users themselves.
However, nowhere in the Diaspora site does it say that any given "seed" will be able to host just one user.
Technologically, it will work out to be very similar to Jabber. Jabber (XMPP) is a chat protocol that is widely supported and implemented; it's the protocol that is now powering Facebook's own chat system, Google's Gchat, and a number of other services.
But just like these huge entities can roll out a Jabber server, I can do it on my own. I can just grab the freely available Jabber code, follow some nerdy instructions, and get a server up and running in a few hours' work.
Once I set that server up, nobody can tell me what to do with it. More to the point, nobody can forbid me from hosting other people and letting them use my chat server.
There are numerous examples of this. The same goes with mail servers -- I can set up my own POP3 server on my own domain and open up mailboxes for my friends. Heck, if I feel like it, I can sell them and provide support ... for money!
If it's played right, Diaspora can become an ecosystem. I believe many of my friends would rather use my own Diaspora server (and know I am responsible for their data) than go to some huge corporate monster. So, collective "seeds" would emerge, with several geeks running each seed and hundreds of users hosting their data on it. You would also have companies providing seed hosting just like the Facebook of today. It will all come down to personal choice eventually. All of the seeds would be able to talk to each other, so it wouldn't really matter what seed your profile is hosted on.
This is not rocket science, and there is nothing new here. I think it is obvious that a "seed" would not serve just a single user -- the very notion is absurd and very much out of accord with the norm on the Web today. Once you get that idea out of the way, the technological side becomes very straightforward.
The Way It's Going To Work
In a best case scenario:
1) The Diaspora team grows, possibly adding someone who can write proper English as well. 2) By the end of the summer, they put out an initial version. 3) That version gets grilled and tested. 4) They iterate, fix, release, fix, release. 5) Within a year, we get something that is actually usable. 6) "Mini-Facebooks" start popping up all over the place, with communities setting up their own servers that can then talk to each other. It's like P2P but for social networking.
Of course, I cannot guarantee Diaspora will be an incredible success. Nobody can. However, I can tell you that I would be very surprised if nothing came of it in the end.
And for the worst case scenario, you can always grab an appletini and go read Matthew's post.
Comments
12
Subscribe to commentsVictorMay 21st 2010 1:07PM
What's the point of starting another social network? The entire value of Facebook (or any social network) is who's on it. EVERYONE I know is on Facebook. Everyone I am likely to meet or develop a business relationship with is also already on Facebook. The value of Facebook isn't it's privacy features or transparency. It's the fact that there's ONE place I can go where everyone I know already is. Diaspora, or the new MySpace, or Twitter, or Foursquare, or Buzz, or Linked In, or whatever will at best only have a fraction of the number of contacts that I have on Facebook. If everyone important to me isn't on it, it will never beat out Facebook, regardless of privacy concerns.
Diaspora sounds like a worthy endeavor, but unless it takes over the world like Facebook, it's another useless social network that will get abandoned by users and developers.
I'm a Google enthusiast, and as much as I wish Google's attempts at social networks gained traction, the truth is, Facebook has won this battle. Anything else that comes along will be a niche product at best.
whiskeyMay 24th 2010 12:20PM
You know, that's what they said about Facebook when people started migrating to it.
StrypeyJun 17th 2010 6:33AM
"The value of Facebook isn't it's privacy features or transparency. It's the fact that there's ONE place I can go where everyone I know already is."
Let's say everyone you know is in prison. You going to go there to hang with them when there is an alternative to them being stuck in there?
JesseMay 21st 2010 1:19PM
I liked your post much better. Sure, launching a startup is tough, and going up against Facebook is like David v. Goliath. But I see more and more negative press for FB every day, and it's only a matter of time before people start to get fed up and look for something else. Social networks don't last forever.
I also like your explanation of the "seeding". 99% of people won't have to worry about setting up or running a server. They'll just go to www.myseedyfriends.com, set up an account and off they go.
It's hard to say if it will succeed or not, but raising $100,000+ in two weeks shows that people are ready for a change.
TKMay 21st 2010 1:33PM
I think Diaspora has a chance of winning, but so do a lot of other players. Truth is, my mom doesn't care about nodes, or seeds, or where her data is stored, she just wants a place where she can have conversations and know exactly who gets to see it.
Over at Braintrust, we believe small contextual social networks for tight knit groups of people are the future. We're starting by focusing on small teams, but hope to grow into serving families, best friends and communities.
EricMay 21st 2010 1:40PM
I can see your point, but it seems really far fetched. By getting money without a product they have essentially sold their potential and not reality. It is next to impossible that Diaspora can produce a product that lives up to expectations. While that is not in and of itself a death sentence, it greatly reduces the effectiveness of iteration. If they don't get it pretty close to right the first time around, most (if not all) the momentum they gathered will be gone.
While it would be great if they were successful, I honestly think they've made things much more difficult the way they've found funding and generally gotten attention. In fact, if it were a fraud in the end, I wouldn't be terribly surprised.
DarlaMay 21st 2010 2:20PM
I think Diaspora has a noble goal, but their setup is too complicated for normal users to understand. What the heck is a distributed social network? I don't understand that completely and I develop software for a living. Besides, http://www.dirtyphonebook.com makes attaining any form of privacy pretty questionable over the long run anyway. Is Diaspora doomed to fail as presently envisioned? Maybe they ought to work on making Diaspora a specific tab within Facebook where users could share data without Facebook having any form of access to it. That might become popular very quickly because it'll be right in front of everybody normal who uses it.
BaylinkMay 21st 2010 2:58PM
The problem is twofold:
The Metcalfe Effect is rough, yes, but MySpace beat Friendster, before it got beaten by Facebook, so it's not impregnable.
The *real* problem's what I call the Napster Conundrum.
Napster was so much more useful than all the other apps that followed it, like Gnutella and ed2k, because *it had a centralized index*.
The other problem is that there are several usefull services Facebook provides which it *can* provide because the central servers constituted a trusted (heh) third party.
The first rule of distributed client-server apps is *you can't trust the client*. Ask John Carmack if you need any more on that. Because that's true, quite a lot of the stuff that makes Facebook useful *can't be implemented* in an environment like Diaspora's, because *everyone's an untrusted client*. To everyone else, that is.
I'm not sure even PKI can solve this problem, completely.
BaylinkMay 21st 2010 3:08PM
I see I neglected to expand my first point:
Napster had a pretty good chance of telling you immediately if someone had what you wanted, *because* it had that centralized index.
Gnutella, bittorrent, and the like, on the other hand, operate roughly by "send[ing] a query out into the net, and waiting for results", the necessary time for which can vary from "drink cup of coffee" to "brew coffee" all the way up to "cook and eat dinner".
Clearly, that's not practical for something intended to replace FB, and I see no way to fix *this* problem either, within the bounds of the system design as it's currently envisioned.
Atanas BoevMay 22nd 2010 2:34AM
Seems to me, they are creating the next IM, instead of the next Facebook.
PeteMay 23rd 2010 8:33AM
People saying that users will stay with facebook because everyone they know is there raise a valid point but I'm not convinced by it. Everyone I know is on facebook but of the 100+ friends the average person has how many do they communicate with daily and how many are noise? I enjoy being able to see what is going on with all my friends but in reallity two or three close friends going to Diaspora would see me go too. If we take the overall Facebook Network and break it down into millions of small micro-networks - groups of friends who share many friends and communicate a lot - it's the more popular people in those groups of friends who will inevitably hold more sway. I'm not being mean, I'm just looking at it rationally, most people aren't going to make changes unless there friends do but if friends who are particularly sociable or popular do then getting a few key friends onto Diaspora will lead to other members of each micro-network moving over. It's easy enough to have more than one social network you're a member of and you will most likely gravitate to the one that they talk most on. There is a critical mass of users and once any network reaches that it expands exponentially.
fang2415Jun 9th 2010 1:49AM
What's so bad about these guys' writing? Everything I've read on the Diaspora site has struck me as crisp, lucid, and accessible English. I was so impressed that at first I figured no way could it have been written by software guys.
Am I missing something here? Am I so nerdy that I don't notice over-technical prose or something?
Anyway, probably too late for this comment to be seen... I for one hope they continue writing their own documentation as well as they have so far. Sure beats the mindfsck that is the Facebook privacy policy...