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.
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.
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.
@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 :/) ...
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!
Google+ is coming to late to a party
that started years ago
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
How complete is the export is exactly?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lot's of ideas get tried out, some times they stick. Other times they take 2 or 3 starts/failures before they stick
http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...
But still sad that Diaspora might close their doors. They can take pride in the fact that their vision is being adopted.
Anyway, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2714109 for google+ invitations.