Google+ "inspired" by diaspora?

http://raventools.com/blog/google-copies-diaspora/

by rajivrnair • 15 years ago

34 42 15 years ago

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.

In the year since Diaspora was announced, though, not much has happened.

Ask anyone in the general public if they've used Diaspora, and you're more likely to get a confused "what's Diaspora?"

At the end of the day, there's really only one measuring stick for a social service: users. We use social sites to communicate with our friends and followers. Facebook is deeply flawed, but people have stayed there because people were staying there.

G+ looks like the first real opportunity for people to leave Facebook without losing the connections they've become addicted to. If G+ is going to be the new default for sharing online, I really just want three things.

1. Let me control my data and my privacy.

2. Play nice with other sites, protocols, and standards.

3. Provide a great user experience, including "borrowing" from other places when it makes sense.

TheOnly92• 15 years ago

"Who" came up with the idea is not important, it's the "Who" who made the idea useful for others, is what matters.

sebbi• 15 years ago

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 switch to yet another social network which does the same ... once was enough for many people, now that everyone and their dog is on the leading network there is no incentive to switch away.

Google+ is coming to late to a party that started years ago and will suffer the same fate as other Google products: only geeks will use them, no matter how good they are (Wave :/) ...

p4bl0• 15 years ago

I completly agree. Also, I think it would be really fun that Facebook implement video chat using Google's open technologies and make it compatible, just to say "meh" to Google.

Khao• 15 years ago

Facebook plays nice with other sites? Have you seen the dozens of news about Facebook developers having their app banned for no reason and with no explanation? What about user accounts being terminated with also no explanation and for no reason (this happened to my account once, and Facebook takes weeks before answering you!)

Facebook is a nightmare, it's built around the concept of spam but since all your friends are on it, you have to be on it. Every app tries to force you to click on things you don't want, so that they will end up in your news feed and attract more sheep. Every few months, they add a new concept that raises tons of questions about privacy and yet their default settings is almost always to allow every user into the new thing (think auto-tagging via facial recognition). The best part of all? They don't even tell you there's a new feature and that YOUR PERSONAL privacy settings have been set to "allow all" for that new feature.

I have been waiting for something like G+ to kick facebook in the face for so long, now I only need an invite!

timmyd• 15 years ago

I agree also. I also think we all need to appreciate the fact that 99% of the world uses Facebook BECAUSE it is a agnostic platform. I have a Gmail account - most of friends "lay persons" in the tech world - use Yahoo or Hotmail, and sure, some use Gmail. They check Facebook on their mobiles and website daily - they don't particularly care about [or even know really] the "wars of technology companies"

Facebook works. All their friends exist on it - it does everything they could possibly want it to do "connect to their friends". In my mind - it's "Google and Bing" all over. Bing works and is arguably just as good as Google these days yet everyone continues to use Google.

Google+ - great for technology people who want to "control their data". Most of my friends don't even understand what "exporting data for portability" even means. They use Facebook, see their friends posts, upload photos, check-in to places and they love that.

It's going to take a LOT MORE "innovation" to move them across to another platform because "it's new, pretty and contains some nifty features that Facebook already contains or will contain in the next 3 months of 'lock-down' in response to Google+". I'm not on Google+ [outrageous request for invite via my profile :D] - but I just can't see my friends moving to it - particularly when they don't even login to Google anyway when they are searching.

Facebook will "win" in my mind - because they are agnostic to email and that's where your "connections" lie and the reason you use Google "mostly" [outrageous generalization again] is because you host your email on Gmail.

rowanseymour• 15 years ago

@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?

bad_user• 15 years ago

     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

dkarl• 15 years ago

They have "Circles" on Facebook that let you restrict status updates? If so, most users are ignorant of them. The most common Facebook complaint that Google+ has provoked among my friends is the need to keep their status stream safe for work, grandma, etc.

I know that Facebook Messages can be targeted to groups, but they aren't really the same thing. Messages aren't designed for sharing; they're designed for, well, messages.

ilir• 15 years ago

une dua te vjedh pare ne poke r dhe du hacker te behm

mgkimsal2• 15 years ago

"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 networks to agree on a common standard.

Yes, it's a pipe dream, but there are already dozens of decent SN platforms out there - we didn't need one more, we needed a way to make them all talk and exchange appropriate data. The big thing holding back many of them seems to be time/effort to coordinate the cooperation. There may be some NIH in there too, but Diaspora was just more one contribution to the NIH pile.

Much thought/work had already gone in to the problem space - using the $200k to help unite that previous work would have been far more productive than another Rails app.

michaelchisari2• 15 years ago

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.

keith_erskine• 15 years ago

Geez - Huddle was "inspired" by Padpaw, but I'm not bitter, much.

Lot's of ideas get tried out, some times they stick. Other times they take 2 or 3 starts/failures before they stick

rch• 15 years ago

I think giving users the ability to build a social identity in G+ now, and then export to wherever, could wind up being a big help to Diaspora in the long run.

How complete is the export is exactly?

chalst• 15 years ago

https://www.google.com/takeout

Currently it supports Contacts and Circles, and Stream. I haven't got a G+ login, so I can't say what form the data takes, but the other data I have looked at was IIRC in CSV format.

donall• 15 years ago

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 before then.

It seems that the notion of friend (circles|aspects) is just one of those obvious ideas that everybody had, but nobody executed properly until now.

apinstein• 15 years ago

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!

dspace2• 15 years ago

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.

jeggers5• 15 years ago

Diaspora was going down the toilet anyways.. why not recycle some of their ideas?

dirtyaura• 15 years ago

I don't think they have copied Diaspora's model.

If you try to solve group communication problems, you by definition need to create some model of groups, be it Circles, Diaspora aspects, Facebook groups, IRC channels, email recipient lists, whatever.

Because both Diaspora and Google+ are clearly inspired by semi-public sharing model of Facebook, it's quite natural that their group model will resemble each other, even be almost identical. If, on the otherhand, a service is focused around group conversation instead of sharing, it's group model might be one where groups are shared among participants, instead of being private aliases.

However, what's much more interesting to me is how a service tries to bootstrap "the group management".

In the beginning you don't have Circles and you don't have strong incentive to group people to Circles when you don't know are you going to use the service and how are you going to use it. Google clearly tried to make it more enjoyable by providing fun visual UI. But it still feels a chore, because benefits are unclear.

I would have emphasized it differently: start from a sharing experience instead of group management. Use email-like recipient list as the basic model and introduce the fun way to make group aliases after you have shared a few items. It's more utilitarian model, which doesn't have as strong virality factor as Google's approach. In Google+ you get something akin to invite when somebody adds you to his Circle.

andylei• 15 years ago

are there any products that don't take features from other products?

feint• 15 years ago

Google was kicking around the idea of circles long before Diaspora. If anything it was the other way around.

JonnieCache• 15 years ago

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.

dspace2• 15 years ago

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.

moondowner• 15 years ago

It's natural Google+ to have someting similar to Diaspora, or Facebook, or any other social community service.

And at the end of the day, It doesn't matter who was the first. What matters is who will be the first that will do it right.

inmygarage• 15 years ago

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.

pgroves• 15 years ago

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

michaelchisari2• 15 years ago

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.

orenmazor• 15 years ago

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.

technomancy• 15 years ago

No, you'll get downvoted for pre-emptively complaining about getting downvoted.

jeffchuber• 15 years ago

I don't think that one can say that Diaspora owned the idea that we have different social circles/aspects.

But still sad that Diaspora might close their doors. They can take pride in the fact that their vision is being adopted.

ignifero• 15 years ago

I remember viewing this presentation months ago, in which an ex-googler presents the idea behind social circles: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...

aw3c2• 15 years ago

Just yesterday I learned about http://project.friendika.com/ which looks like a nice distributed network too and maybe without the Diaspora troubles.

StrawberryFrog• 15 years ago

No. Google+ has shipped.

widget• 15 years ago

The iPod wasn't the first mp3 player.

Facebook wasn't the first social networking site.

Google wasn't the first search engine.

Windows/Mac/Unix weren't the first operating systems.

Taking ideas from competitors and improving upon them is a fundamental part of business. No one actually thinks that coming up with a product concept is the same as delivering a product that users actually want.

hetman• 15 years ago

What's interesting to me here is the impact the right naming for a feature can have.

I think "circles" as in "circles of friends" would be intuitive to most users. Probably because the concept corresponds to how people already organise their social groups anyway.

An "aspect" on the other hand focuses not on the who, but on how you present your self. I think this would be much more obscure for most users to get used to even though the end effect is basically the same.

sygeek• 15 years ago

I'm wondering is Diaspora can sue Google for this "inspiration".

Anyway, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2714109 for google+ invitations.

naner• 15 years ago

The future of Diaspora is now in doubt

When was it not in doubt? They got money and momentum during some Facebook privacy blunder that was so ephemeral I can't even remember what it was about.

loumf• 15 years ago

Google has been working on Circles for over a year -- and it's based on research they conducted before that.

http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...

clark-kent• 15 years ago

For those bashing the diaspora guys, remember it takes years to create a successful Open source project. Most popular OSS projects are at least 3-5 years old. Cut the guys some slack. HN readers should understand this more than any other site.

Google+ "inspired" by diaspora?

Related Stories