Those poor, poor guys. Nobody deserves their awful fate: To have to try to invent an audacious new startup, with a hazily defined product that is bound to let half of the audience down when it doesn't have unicorns and rainbows, all the while living in a fishbowl, surrounded on all sides by a mob six thousand strong, a mob made of people who feel that, having kicked in thirty whole US dollars, they deserve something awesome.
It's not just a bad idea. It's really cruel. I have been to a first-rate grad school. I have read Pepper White's The Idea Factory, a book which gave me nightmares and made me want to travel across the campus offering hugs to every grad student I could find. And thus I have seen some of the best minds of my generation driven into near-suicidal depression by their self-perceived inability to live up to their expectations of greatness, or their parents' expectations, or their own perception of their parents' expectations. And these are people without an audience of thousands.
So I'm really afraid for these Diaspora guys. Way too much spotlight, way too soon. Startup ideas fail; that is what they do most of the time. Are these guys going to be given room to fail a few times? Or are they ultimately going to need therapy?
Let me try to help: If the Diaspora team gets together at the end of September and puts on a Youtube production of Springtime for Hitler I'll send them fifty bucks. If they ship some software as well, I'll make it sixty.
Even though I didn't donate, I'm cheering for the team and their undertaking. Best of luck to them.
Your reference to Springtime to Hitler brings another question: have there been known cases of startups who raised money with intention to fail, The Producers-style?
(To clarify, this is obviously not a reference to Diaspora, just a tangential question.)
I hate to say it, but this is what happens when you have a bunch of people, who have no idea what early stage investing is like, and have them invest in an early stage company. It results in:
* the wrong amount of money being given
* extremely high expectations
* 24 / 7 monitoring, with anger if any tiny mistake is made
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,
I think that's completely the wrong offer. As you just said, they have way too much money.
What they need is some solid UI people to come take a look, and a few backend people wouldn't hurt either. They probably have something right now, they're just terrified of launching. What they need is a safe group to beta-test with who can help clean up some of the rough edges.
I definitely empathize with the feeling of having too much attention too soon. That said, I think there are worse predicaments to be in - at the worst, their product flops or never comes out fully-baked, but they had the funds to live on during that process and will doubtless have learned a lot.
"You may not hear too much from us in the coming months and we will try our best to provide regular updates, but our silence means we are hard at work."
It's not like they had daily updates for weeks and then stopped. Since starting they've had one post. It appears intentional.
They sure are operating more like a dot-com vaporware startup than an open source project. I understand not releasing code right away, there's reasons for that, but why no specifics about their approach? Why is everything about this project a guessing game?
A few Fridays a month I feel like blasting the following message to a few people. I think the Diaspora guys would love to FWD it to anybody inquiring about their lack of blog posts:
"Guys,
Our meeting on Friday at 4PM still stands. I will submit the deliverables by then and you will have 5 business days to evaluate my work. In the meantime, it would be super-nice if I didn't have to make daily statements, as the conference calls and meetings are taking up a lot of my energy and time. My work is documented, to the extent that any competent developer can dive-in and understand the gist of it immediately. At the moment, I am unable to communicate our progress to several people, at several different levels of technical sophistication, at the same time. So I would really appreciate it if you let me get this done, at once, and we talk about it afterwards.
So you feel like doing it -- but you are not doing it, right? Must have reasons. And I think one reason may be that nobody will listen and stay off your back for 5 business days.
Meanwhile, the Appleseed Project has been posting regular updates all summer. Their roadmap, SVN, and documentation is available to everyone, and they've been building the software since 2004.
Actually they did post an update already at the Federated Social Web summit and they showed some nice progress, they have almost full ostatus compatibility. There's a pdf of their presentation here:
I have nothing against RoR, but I don't think it is a good choice for the goal of having an easy self-install application. If you look at the popular self-install apps, such as Wordpress, PHPBB, Drupal, etc. they are all written in PHP. There is a lot more small-scale hosting support for PHP, especially because of mod_php. Dump all the files in a public directory, fire up the URL and presto. While there are some RoR hosting providers who can do this, most of the target audience (ie. semi-literate tech people) are more accustomed to being able to install a PHP app.
I use RoR, but if I had to build a product that users would install on a server and run themselves, I would probably build it in PHP, despite the other known disadvantages.
Just because most PHP projects waste a bunch of time writing complicated installers doesn't mean you couldn't do the same with a RoR app. Familiarity can be a dangerous thing anyway, and installers are something to be avoided. Instead we should strive for a simple, single step deploy process. Heroku has already solved this with git and a rubygem.
What's wrong with Passenger (mod_rails)? There's not really a difference to mod_php in terms of deployment, especially if you're not altering the software.
Hey Diaspora, if your reading this...GO GET 'EM! You guys will do great.
A lot of people seem to be concentrating on this idea that having a lot of money is bad for these guys. I'm on the other side of the fence. History favors companies that have taken money. And unlike any investment round I've ever participated in, they gave up no equity to fundraise. They also have a gaggle of really awesome, very experienced mentors helping them. I think they will be fine. I'm rooting for them. REALLY rooting for them. They're just nose down in code with the door shut and the phone off the hook. Good on ya.
September was clearly quite unrealistic, from the perspective of a developer who was previously in the habit of making unrealistic project time forecasts.
NEVER believe anyone who says this, that etc. can be done in three months. I don't believe people who insist 'I wrote this and this in a weekend!' either. Yeah, you and that library that took three months to write. Six-nine months would make sense for a project like this, at least if you're planning on ending up with something worth using.
I've already forgotten about diaspora (such a weird word to say). Hopefully when they release it really is something amazing and they prove every naysayer wrong. And if it really is great, mainstream media needs to pick it up like they picked up twitter, then we have real competition.
Did you give them money? Those people probably haven't forgotten. The problem is that they are on the hook for something that's effectively impossible, with limited options for getting out of the situation.
C'mon, while they have a very good idea in theory, I don't think it could work. The general public is not quite ready. It's too technical to host your own node and there won't be a critical mass who can figure out how.
Actually, when I heard their idea, my thought was 'Wow, I could write that. It'd take a long time, but I could do it. Wish I'd thought of it first.'
With enough work, it would be as easy to set up (or easier) than any other blog. The connections to other diaspora instances would be as easy as logging into OpenID... Just visit their page, put in your URL, request a link, and wait for the other person to grant it. It could also be done the other way with putting their link into your blog, and having the backend take care of it. I'm sure there are other ways, too.
So yeah, it could work. Not in that short amount of time, but it could work.
Unless they sell some sort of Sheeva plug with everything already installed (with configuration and automatic updates). That could be easier than Facebook.
And they wouldn't need the critical mass: the plug computer could come with a blog engine, bittorrent (client and tracker), a mail server for the family… It could be the Eben Moglen's freedom box that inspired them to start Diaspora in the first place.
I think the bigger problem is how do you find friends on it? Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand how you will be able to search the network for people you know.
I don't know if I'm being naive, but I thought the main reason Diaspora is open source is so that other hackers can improve on it. Failure of an open source project is a failure of all hackers interested in it.
I kinda feel bad for these guys. People need to stufu and relax. Like, go troll github for a project to contribute to and just leave people alone till they have something to say. Especially you, mattwdelong.
[+] [-] mechanical_fish|15 years ago|reply
It's not just a bad idea. It's really cruel. I have been to a first-rate grad school. I have read Pepper White's The Idea Factory, a book which gave me nightmares and made me want to travel across the campus offering hugs to every grad student I could find. And thus I have seen some of the best minds of my generation driven into near-suicidal depression by their self-perceived inability to live up to their expectations of greatness, or their parents' expectations, or their own perception of their parents' expectations. And these are people without an audience of thousands.
So I'm really afraid for these Diaspora guys. Way too much spotlight, way too soon. Startup ideas fail; that is what they do most of the time. Are these guys going to be given room to fail a few times? Or are they ultimately going to need therapy?
Let me try to help: If the Diaspora team gets together at the end of September and puts on a Youtube production of Springtime for Hitler I'll send them fifty bucks. If they ship some software as well, I'll make it sixty.
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|15 years ago|reply
Still, I suspect that Kickstarter will suffer more than the Diaspora guys if Diaspora fails.
[+] [-] d_r|15 years ago|reply
Your reference to Springtime to Hitler brings another question: have there been known cases of startups who raised money with intention to fail, The Producers-style?
(To clarify, this is obviously not a reference to Diaspora, just a tangential question.)
[+] [-] bballbackus|15 years ago|reply
* the wrong amount of money being given
* extremely high expectations
* 24 / 7 monitoring, with anger if any tiny mistake is made
[+] [-] yread|15 years ago|reply
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
The best minds of all generations always suffer!
[+] [-] sprout|15 years ago|reply
What they need is some solid UI people to come take a look, and a few backend people wouldn't hurt either. They probably have something right now, they're just terrified of launching. What they need is a safe group to beta-test with who can help clean up some of the rough edges.
[+] [-] patrickaljord|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sabj|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] al_james|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jonknee|15 years ago|reply
http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/05/31/a-little-more-than-24...
"You may not hear too much from us in the coming months and we will try our best to provide regular updates, but our silence means we are hard at work."
It's not like they had daily updates for weeks and then stopped. Since starting they've had one post. It appears intentional.
[+] [-] jlgbecom|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mahmud|15 years ago|reply
"Guys,
Our meeting on Friday at 4PM still stands. I will submit the deliverables by then and you will have 5 business days to evaluate my work. In the meantime, it would be super-nice if I didn't have to make daily statements, as the conference calls and meetings are taking up a lot of my energy and time. My work is documented, to the extent that any competent developer can dive-in and understand the gist of it immediately. At the moment, I am unable to communicate our progress to several people, at several different levels of technical sophistication, at the same time. So I would really appreciate it if you let me get this done, at once, and we talk about it afterwards.
Regards
- mahmud"
[+] [-] cema|15 years ago|reply
What are the other reasons?
[+] [-] jlgbecom|15 years ago|reply
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org
[+] [-] patrickaljord|15 years ago|reply
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15865/diaspora_pres.pdf
[+] [-] rb2k_|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bl4k|15 years ago|reply
I use RoR, but if I had to build a product that users would install on a server and run themselves, I would probably build it in PHP, despite the other known disadvantages.
[+] [-] yock|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binbasti|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j2d2|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattwdelong|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] failquicker|15 years ago|reply
A lot of people seem to be concentrating on this idea that having a lot of money is bad for these guys. I'm on the other side of the fence. History favors companies that have taken money. And unlike any investment round I've ever participated in, they gave up no equity to fundraise. They also have a gaggle of really awesome, very experienced mentors helping them. I think they will be fine. I'm rooting for them. REALLY rooting for them. They're just nose down in code with the door shut and the phone off the hook. Good on ya.
[+] [-] code_duck|15 years ago|reply
NEVER believe anyone who says this, that etc. can be done in three months. I don't believe people who insist 'I wrote this and this in a weekend!' either. Yeah, you and that library that took three months to write. Six-nine months would make sense for a project like this, at least if you're planning on ending up with something worth using.
[+] [-] wwortiz|15 years ago|reply
I have my doubts though.
[+] [-] po|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dawsdesign|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wccrawford|15 years ago|reply
With enough work, it would be as easy to set up (or easier) than any other blog. The connections to other diaspora instances would be as easy as logging into OpenID... Just visit their page, put in your URL, request a link, and wait for the other person to grant it. It could also be done the other way with putting their link into your blog, and having the backend take care of it. I'm sure there are other ways, too.
So yeah, it could work. Not in that short amount of time, but it could work.
[+] [-] loup-vaillant|15 years ago|reply
And they wouldn't need the critical mass: the plug computer could come with a blog engine, bittorrent (client and tracker), a mail server for the family… It could be the Eben Moglen's freedom box that inspired them to start Diaspora in the first place.
[+] [-] what|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickaljord|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krmboya|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tycho|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rblion|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Raphael|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siculars|15 years ago|reply