You forgot another interesting incidence: The name of one member is Maxwell Salzberg. Salz is German for salt, and Zucker ist German for sugar, Berg means mountain. Mark and Maxwell are also very similar names, so Mark Zuckerberg ist quite near.
This has been troubling me for some time as many things do not add up about the Diaspora project. He are my concerns:
1. The amount of publicity they received was really unusual for an idea that was hardly novel and was already being implemented my many other projects. Appleseed also used kickstarter but only raised less than $1k vs $200k for diaspora.
2. Zuckerberg gave them $100k which is really illogical.
3. All their pr material whilst appearing amateur is really quite polished and on-message.
4. They refused all offers of assistance whilst doing an open source development project.
5. They stayed pretty much off the radar after getting the cash with almost no updates.
6. They ignored offers of free technology to make the project more open.
7. They went on holiday the week before their launch WTF??????????????
8. They claim to have been focused upon UI instead of promised features but have produced a totally lame and bland facebook clone.
9. They chose a development platform that will ensure that very few developers can assess their work or contribute in future
10. ...and this also ensured that Diaspora will NEVER be a multi-platform 1-click installer unless completely rewritten - alienating the VAST MAJORITY of Facebook users.
11. Their contributors agreement is so draconian that only a complete idiot would contribute
12. You do not own you own seed unless you are self-hosting (which 99.9999999% of people WONT be doing) so whoever hosts your seed OWNS your diaspora identity and data
13. Which is possibly why they hide who owns their public server trydiaspora.com
14. They released a product that is so far removed from what they promised and can never achieve some of their claims such as running on mobile phones that if their funding was raised in any other way they could be facing legal action right now.
When you factor in that centralized social services like twitter and facebook are very concerned about the threat that open source and decentralization pose to their business models, I see how this could easily be a con-job funded by interested parties.
Did these guys all belong to the same Jewish fraternity as Zuckerberg or something?
I personally expect to see one or more of the Diaspora boys joining Facebook, Google or some other "privacy aware" company before too long.
They could always prove me wrong by producing the goods next month. I will be the first to admit that I had them pegged wrong and buy them a beer.
You forgot another interesting incidence: The name of one member is Maxwell Salzberg. Salz is German for salt, and Zucker ist German for sugar, Berg means mountain. Mark and Maxwell are also very similar names, so Mark Zuckerberg ist quite near.
I have this feeling that the companies that have been helping them out would have been able to see through the charade. It would give some of those companies a serious black eye if they were found out to be part of some plot as mentioned above. Even if the companies were innocent, there would always be that doubt in some people's eyes and their bottom lines would suffer greatly.
I thought all the guys that were doing diaspora were from the same university. It would also kill that university, which is probably counting on the fame that comes along with their students coming up with the first open source social networking software to possibly be widely accepted, go global and kickstart the wide acceptance of open source alternatives. If diaspora does take off, it will help to start a revolution where open source will be more accepted by the mases.
I won't buy into any conspiracy theories here and I don't think it is all that far off of what they "promised" but I will agree that I am not crazy about a couple of their choices if they truly expected this to lead to an explosion of development.
I don't agree that it is a bland facebook clone. It is a very basic social networking implementation, almost beautiful in its simplicity and really all that needs to happen is for the base to be expanded into a richer experience. It has to have some familiarity of experience or the masses will not catch on. That's just a fact. If it was radically different than fb in every possible way, it would die in the wading pool.
While I understand why they did it - namely to facilitate free distribution employing all open-source elements and avoidance of any sort of licencing issues - I really wish they had not used RoR and IMO, the biggest first development push should be to move the same functionality into other code-bases and server/dev platforms. Self-hosting is a necessity and inevitability if people believe this is worth pushing forward. otherwise, I agree that it is unlikely to succeed at the grand vision of decentralization.
Are you sure Zuckerberg gave then $100K? If that is true, it doesn't really alarm me but it would be unexpected.
I'm happy that these guys from my school were able to build something lie this. It's inspiring to other people.
That said, the problem of having a social network with better privacy is a hard one. All they've done, privacy-wise, is exacerbate the problem -- instead of having to trust only Facebook, Inc., I now have to trust EVERY HOSTING COMPANY that hosts my friends' nodes. Any company that hosts 1000 diaspora nodes can compromise information of around 127,000 people, assuming 127 friends on average.
However, this is a HUGE WIN for decentralization dreams
Good point about trusting the security of the other providers.
Just curious about the 127 you mentioned. Is that a real average numbrr of friends? If so, that is interesting because in real life i could not name that many close friends without having to throw in co-worker names with whom i have little or no contact with oitside of work.
Thanks for posting.
https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
"Average user has 130 friends"