Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

by edw519 • 16 years ago

190 88 16 years ago

chegra2• 16 years ago

Just have one question: Who is going to pay for the nodes?

jonknee• 16 years ago

Schools, companies, ISPs, etc. Probably whoever runs email servers today, it's the same idea (imagine if email were all controlled by Zuckerberg).

orblivion7• 16 years ago

They said they'd have a turnkey paid service. I guess that exists in email as well.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

I'll put up for at least one, but I want them to get to the point where I believe they'll actually complete this.

For now they're kids with good intentions that have landed a 'live one', let's see if they can run with it and have the stamina required for something like this.

10 years ago I would have been much quicker to jump in but I've learned the hard way to be a bit more wary.

chegra2• 16 years ago

I wish a few more people would start something so I could rest my weight against something.

enneff2• 16 years ago

I would happy run a node that supports 10,000 people (that's approximately all the people I know, and all the people they know).

cilantro2• 16 years ago

I'd like to see such software living on a moderately priced beefed up router. Call it an "information appliance"... It would function both as, a gateway to the internet when you're at home, and persistent store accessible from anywhere. Having it live on top of your firewall would make it easier for low-tech users to make use of such a device.

SwellJoe• 16 years ago

This has the same problem as existing personal data storage appliances and such...data redundancy and reliability is a really hard problem to solve by non-technical users.

An appliance, to be really reliable, needs to automatically store it's data somewhere else...like, say, a central backup service run by the company that sold the device. Oh, but now a central company has all your private data. Oops.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

Great advertising for kickstarter!

I'll bet you they will get more out of this than diaspora in the long run.

There is an interesting Jewish sub-theme to all this, Diaspora being obviously a term with a strong connection to the Jewish faith, most or all of these four are from Jewish heritage and Zuckerberg himself is too.

RK• 16 years ago

The term diaspora is not exclusive to Jews. Just ask the Irish diaspora, the African diaspora, the Greek diaspora, etc.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

True enough, but the Jewish connection really is a fairly strong one, and a large number of people would recognize the word as to be intricately related to the story about the Jewish people being 'scattered to the four winds' after leaving Israel.

I think their Jewish background is what caused them to pick it, not because they relate it to African, Greek or Irish events.

jacoblyles• 16 years ago

Technically the word "diaspora" can apply to any disperse part of a group. However, it does have a Jewish connotation since the Jewish people lived completely as a diaspora with no central nation for more than a millenium. Moreover, the word is most commonly used when referring to the Jewish Diaspora.

sdfx• 16 years ago

It's an odd choice to use a name with such strong historic connotations as opposed to something generic like Yahoo or Google. This might create expectations or alienate some users. And the asterisk is just annoying. But on the other hand, if they are successful the name won't matter one iota.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

I don't know, to me the name was very apt.

A large number of people leaving their 'home'.

I've seen worse metaphors.

orblivion7• 16 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if they decide that this was just a "code name" for the project and come up with something that sells better. Though I like the name.

Raphael2• 16 years ago

Iota, now there's a name!

brandnewlow3• 16 years ago

Agreed. Kickstarter really played this well.

thaumaturgy• 16 years ago

I love how there's the classic old Unix-commandline-sex-joke on the chalkboard in the background of the image.

gort• 16 years ago

Thanks. I had to adjust the brightness on my screen to see it; it says: touch, grep, unzip, mount, fsck, fsck, fsck, umount.

Clearly someone's worried about the integrity of their filesystem.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

They will have problems mounting their file system, it looks like the mandatory 'finger' is missing.

alanh• 16 years ago

It appears the NYT has cropped the joke out of their photo. (Cached: http://www.geekosystem.com/dirty-unix-joke-nyt-facebook-nyu/)

alexyim• 16 years ago

Thanks. I thought I was about to lose my geek cred for not seeing it

natfriedman• 16 years ago

If identica is a relevant comparable, it will be tough for them to get mainstream momentum, but their site will be useful for a certain type of person, which could actually give it an 'identity' and make it at least useful in the nerd niche.

Cute that they got the touch / grep / mount / fsck fsck fsck joke in there on the chalk board.

dminor• 16 years ago

I think the difference is that Identica hasn't found any terribly rich veins of Twitter discontent to tap into, whereas Diaspora is getting NY Times publicity just because Facebook has pissed so many people off with their privacy issues. And this despite the fact that Diaspora doesn't even exist yet.

wingo• 16 years ago

It's very remarkable, that; rock-band-like publicity for something that does not yet exist.

danieldon• 16 years ago

identica has some serious design and ux issues. I don't think it's safe to use it as a benchmark.

manish• 16 years ago

Too much exaggeration. PR style article

orblivion7• 16 years ago

One thing I look forward to is being able to do whatever I want with my page. It being open source, there's no way they could stop that from happening, even if it wasn't in their design. From the beginning of social networks, part of me always figured, what's the point? You want pictures of me, list of my interests? I can put that on my website. You want to know who my friends are? Is that so important? But ultimately I do understand the benefit of connectedness. But with Diaspora, I figure I could just make my personal website into a Diaspora site.

orblivion7• 16 years ago

Wow, they were at double their goal yesterday, today they're at triple: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p...

And 20 days left to go. What are these nerds going to do with all this money? Deluxe Ramen I suppose.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

Pizza is my guess. They're doing really great. It's close to 40K now. The great thing here is that it won't cost them a single point in equity.

Let's hope they don't screw up, if they do this right then it just might be that start-ups have a viable new route to find funding very quickly.

If they do mess up this high profile case will ruin the future for a lot of others, everybody will point to them and say 'remember diaspora'.

dpcan3• 16 years ago

Right now, these guys are thinking about development, but they should already be thinking about "adoption".

If it's too geeky, it will never take off. It needs to be trendy and sassy, whether you like it or not. The "if we build it they will come" approach may shoot this thing in the foot.

On another note, are we putting data in control of the "user" or their "isp"?

This feels like the Kazaa or Napster of social networking, which can so easily be shut down by ISPs.

Lastly, people use Facebook at work and at home, and they log onto it from their friend's houses, their phones, etc. If it's all on my "node" at home, do I have to leave my stuff running all the time? That's not very convenient or green. And I don't want my bandwidth at home being eaten up every time my friends want to look at my vacation photos.

Anyway, kudos for the ambition, but the idea needs more time.

philk• 16 years ago

What you really want is a central repository where your encrypted data can be uploaded to and only decrypted by those you choose (not the host itself).

ErrantX• 16 years ago

Kinda like... a Tarsnap where you can share a "readonly" key with some people.

dpcan3• 16 years ago

Maybe. This is how backup services like Carbonite work. I can create a key that they don't have, and if I lose it, I'm locked out, bye bye data. Otherwise, where there's a key, there's a master key, and we're right back where we started.

newobj• 16 years ago

And what happens when I want to remove one of my 200 friends? Conversely, what happens when I want to add a new friend and give them access to my 200 photos? The only answer I can imagine involves a (#friends X #resources) duplication of storage, processing, etc.

eli2• 16 years ago

Honestly, I think I would be fine with a unencrypted central repository that just isn't evil. Something with a very clear policy on what data is stored and what is done with.

I assure you the mechanics of how the data is stored is not of interest to 99% of people. Nobody really understands encryption anyway. Or is this site exclusively for geeks?

tumland2• 16 years ago

But the ISP controls data transmission, not storage. The ISP can't go sell your private information to someone, short of logging packets and extracting the data, which they have no authority to do. The point of distributing social networks is moving control into the hands of users rather than big business, and this makes sense because social activities off the net operate this way.

dpcan3• 16 years ago

That's basically what I'm saying too. The user needs to be in control, but this idea needs work. Simply going with the "node" route is giving ISP's too much control over the distribution, and hence, your data is still being "controlled" by a big corporation, just in another manner of speaking.

stcredzero• 16 years ago

So make it compatible with various cloud providers. Better yet, start a nonprofit that transparently hosts the nodes on various cloud providers for a fee. When a provider starts misbehaving, transparently move those nodes to the others.

This way, the FB-alternative becomes a voice in the free market for respecting privacy.

mcantelon• 16 years ago

I am guessing the hosted option is going to be the only plausible option for the vast majority of users.

orblivion7• 16 years ago

I was just thinking, they may want to try to prey on the weak, capitalize on Ning's downslope. Anybody could set up a small social network in their school, at home, etc. Not having to worry about any aspect of Facebook they don't like. And then they could start to federate with other networks, and then everybody would suddenly have an account. That might get a foothold.

listic• 16 years ago

I think, it's too early to think about mainstream adoption.

With luck, what they will be able to do by the end of the summer is build version 0.01 of core social network codebase and gain enough interest from open source developers for the project to keep rolling. With luck, over time the project will develop to the point that real social networks for casual people will be built upon it. With luck, those will gain traction.

These guys want to build Linux 0.01, you want "Linux On The Desktop". Not saying it is implausible, just quite different stages of product development.

jgrahamc• 16 years ago

It'll fail because the average person does not care about their privacy that much. What'll happen is Facebook will continually adjust their privacy policies watching the non-reaction and reaction from the public adding and deleting as necessary. They'll simple evolve to stay relevant.

What the average person wants is functionality, not some enhanced privacy. To succeed they'll need to offer enhanced functionality.

orblivion7• 16 years ago

If it doesn't take off as a service but stays as a looming threat to Facebook, especially being open source and impossible to entirely kill, it'll still be worth it, though granted still a disappointment.

hpvic03• 16 years ago

You could get a basic, working social network built for a few hundred bucks, but that wouldn't make it a threat to Facebook. And Diaspora won't be one either, unless they've got a trick up their sleeve.

The only thing that is a threat to Facebook is something that causes them to start hemorrhaging users. But face it, when the average person logs in to Facebook they have new stuff to look at it and people to communicate with. But if they signup and login to Diaspora, there just won't be as much activity, if any. So the average person will go back to Facebook, and stay there, until all of his/her friends move to Diaspora. But they won't, for the same reason. It's just not going to happen unless there is some fundamental change.

The reason Facebook gained users so fast was because they generated incredible amount of buzz by making it exclusive and lauching it at Harvard. If I were diaspora, I would follow the exact same launch plan. However, from what they're saying it sounds like this won't be the plan.

So when they launch they'll have a bunch of hacker types come signup and check it out, and they'll possibly even invite their friends. And a few friends may even join. But those friends (normals) will go back to Facebook simply because there's more stuff to look at and more people to talk with. And that will be the end.

yellowbkpk• 16 years ago

Isn't this all going in the opposite direction of the rest of the industry? I see lots of people touting the "cloud" and other forms of centralized computing where scalability matters. Asking each person to carry around their own personal data as a diaspora node might be swinging the pendulum back a little too far from the other Facebook extreme.

I don't think people are upset that there is a single entity holding everyone's data (I mean look at Google and Yahoo, they certainly have a similar amount of information if not more) -- they're upset about the way the data is handled. Slowly eroding privacy standards, weirdly-automatic linking with external sites.

I bet 90% of Facebook's troubles would go away if they came up with an elegant way for a normal person to set privacy settings and then promise to not change them while at the same time offering opt-in on all future changes rather than opt-out. It's probably too late for Facebook, but maybe not for a clone.

tumland2• 16 years ago

I agree with opt-in rather than opt-out. default into a safe/secure state is a basic principle of computer security. This is why Google Buzz's automatically adding followers was an awful idea, no matter how convenient it seems for users.

jseliger• 16 years ago

I followed this link to the NYT article and the NYT article to the Diaspora website, where I a) can't sign up and b) can't even leave my email in the hopes that one day I'll be able to. This doesn't seem very smart to me: they ought to at least have a box that says, "leave us your e-mail!", especially if they have publicity from the NYT.

sp3322• 16 years ago

You can sign up for a newsletter, but the link seems to have dropped off the face of the internet: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=0AoQmncVLKXRBdFo...

cyanbane• 16 years ago

HN Commenters: what do you feel is the moral responsibility of a social site in an instance where someone has the ability to post something at large vs a group of 'friends'? Do you think the site should notify a person at a per post level/status entry (some type of warning... 'this will be posted to ALL site X users, etc') or just a one time warning at the personal configuration level?

paulnelligan• 16 years ago

Can anyone please explain to me what exactly a 'node' entails ... how is it any different from a 'profile'

you can put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig

all the same, I wish them luck, why?, because it's not facebook...

cellshade• 16 years ago

a node is like an email server. your 'profile' lives in a node the way your email address lives at an email server.

percept2• 16 years ago

Much like politicians work a fringe issue and then gradually move to the center, I think this group will need to focus on building a (brand-) friendly and usable alternative to Facebook in order to have any chance of competing.

Then privacy can be a feature and not their raison d'être.

It also isn't too late to change the name.

ralphc• 16 years ago

I can't honestly accept the terms of submission, but this picture definitely belongs on http://devteamorindieband.tumblr.com/

hassenben• 16 years ago

“So many people think it needs to exist,” Mr. Salzberg said. “We’re making it because we want to use it.”

Selfish motives provide the greatest motivation. At least, they are working on it for the right reasons.

kevintwohy• 16 years ago

Hate to be the downer, but the problem with this is that people don't really care about privacy. The NYTimes and every other mainstream news publication has been running this exact same story for five years: "New edgy upstart ______ is aiming to be the antidote to FB/Twitter oversharing by introducing innovative privacy controls..."

Most, if not all, of those services have seen a brief flurry of activity before eventually withering and dying. People don't truly care about privacy -- they like the idea of their privacy being important, in theory. No combination of new features, openness, or distributed systems is going to be able to overcome the fact that people largely only care about two things when it comes to social networking: being on the network that the most of their friends are on, and having their stuff seen by the most amount of people possible.

If you ask, people will tell you until they're breathless that privacy is important to them -- but almost no one will ever touch the robust privacy controls they asked for.

sp3322• 16 years ago

Rasing >$20,000 in 2 weeks says someone cares about privacy.

doron2• 16 years ago

People keep saying this, but i don't think it is true. People do care about privacy quite allot, many will lower the shades when they undress, not all of them speak about their sexual identity for instance, a good number of people are nervous about the census, or get worried about NSA wiretapping.

What seems to be the case is that people are largely unaware what kind of data collection mechanisms are in place.

There is a growing concern, and it is not just facebook, it is very distressing to people when they find that their gmail\yahoo\whatever has been hacked and "they" ware sending Viagra ads to all their friends and colleagues.

I often meet people burned in such manner, and their attitude about online security changed dramatically, often without guidance they do not know how to approach the problem.

In addition the interface always gives a sense of security by abstracting your communication with other people.

There is a great market potential for a private by default.

ElbertF• 16 years ago

The average user may not think about privacy that much but when ex-husbands start responding to pictures of their kids I'm sure even most house wives will start looking for an alternative (and spread the word like wild fire). Give it a couple of years and Oprah will be deleting her account on live TV. Twitter was geek-only for years until they suddenly went main-stream.

brandnewlow3• 16 years ago

Where's the fun in what they're building? No one wants a "privacy app." People want stuff that makes their mundane lives a little more enjoyable.

jcl• 16 years ago

There might be no fun, but there's definitely fear, which is also a valid motivator -- though more stick than carrot.

There's no fun in a "relatively secure, virus-free platform", but that doesn't stop Apple from billing their OS as such.

brandnewlow3• 16 years ago

An OS solves a business problem though. A social network is supposed to solve the fun problem.

dfj225• 16 years ago

I've been wondering how much fear over privacy issues the normal Facebook user has.

My guess is that most Facebook users aren't aware of, or perhaps not interested in, the privacy issues that discussed by people like the ones here at HN.

I don't think the average person will care unless there is some widely publicized abuse of private information by Facebook. Until then, everyone probably will just see these issues as hypothetical.

raheemm• 16 years ago

They don't have a product. Their product idea sounds revolutionary but its kinda far-fetched. However the press they have received is astounding. So I wonder what is the sequence of events that lead to them being featured on nytimes, HN, etc.

malditogeek• 16 years ago

The idea is good, but isn't anything new. And right now Diaspora looks like vaporware...

Instead, the One Social Web guys [http://onesocialweb.org] are developing an open source decentralized XMPP based social network that works and is based on solid standards. And you can go, grab the code and try it right now. But they don't appear in the mainstream media...

IMHO, instead of raise money and start looking at their own bellybutton they should join efforts with other initiatives and go for something bigger.

SpacemanSpiff• 16 years ago

At this point, they seem to be raising about $50/min through kickstarter. I'd say there is interest in this idea..

petercooper• 16 years ago

When a project gets a lot of press and back-slapping up front, I feel a little concerned. We've seen this happen to a lot of projects that didn't pan out. The best things seem to have "crept up" on us gradually over time (e.g. Skype, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, PayPal, Hacker News, Reddit, Wordpress, Stack Overflow, Gary Vaynerchuk) rather than have had a lot of hype before launch (as with Hunch, Cuil, Wolfram Alpha, Squidoo).

I hope these guys make it, but the smell of hype needs to dissipate quickly.

percept2• 16 years ago

Maybe they'll all get hired.

jschuur• 16 years ago

Personally, I don't have a huge beef with Facebook at this time, and I'm staying put there, but that's not to say other people shouldn't be thinking out loud, playing with and launching alternatives for how people stay in touch and collaborate online. Right now I'm not too concerned with these specific four's coding abilities or whether or not Diaspora stands a chance to attract a wide audience. What's important is that different groups of people try different things.

Having said that, now that they're raised a lot of cash in a short period of time, they have a responsibility to account for how it's being spent. What are the project milestones? What are they committing to release, based on their current budget? Where is the money going? What kind of availability do they have to work on this beyond the summer? What is their plan for when they run out of money?

They've attracted a lot of eyeballs and dollars because people decided to vote out of spite against Facebook with their wallets, and not because of careful due diligence of Diaspora's plan. The stakes are high and a lot of people will expect to see results before the year is over. These four are going to have a lot of Google juice associated with their names for years to come, so they better know what they're getting themselves into.

jasonwilk• 16 years ago

Sweet beanie...wait

c00p3r• 16 years ago

Good, free PR. Want free publicity? Setup a web site which locks like "innovative" project and attack flash and facebook.

Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook

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