7 ms·

What Diaspora Should Do with their Newfound Fuckyoufacebook Money

58 points by derekc 16y ago

iamdave 16y ago
I'm perturbed that "Get to work" is number 5. Get to work, build a product. Build a good product. The rest will fall into place.
- sketerpot 16y ago
  They already have some working code, and they're cheerfully hacking away on it as we speak. So I'd say the Diaspora guys are doing well at this "Get to work" thing. (Diaspora guys, if you're reading this: good luck!)
- derekc 16y ago
  Should be #1 on that list.
  - telemachos 16y ago
    Given how much money they've taken in, I think "Get organized" (i.e., some combination of 1,2 and 4 on the blog) probably needs to go before code. As much money as they received brings its own responsibilities. They already have too much to just write something and then see what happens.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    You might think so. But coding is the easiest part of what they need to do. Not only do they need to figure out exactly what feature set they need to implement, they need to have a plan to steal facebook users, a way of scaling up, and a counter-response to any response that facebook might attempt. This can't be a release-and-refine job -- their first version will launch with some media fanfare and unless it rapidly gains momentum it will fail. Writing some code isn't the first step here any more than "fire some bullets" is the first step towards invading a country.
    - wvenable 16y ago
      > But coding is the easiest part of what they need to do. I agree that it's easy, but it's also time consuming. They originally gave themselves 3 months -- that's a vanishingly small amount of time to produce any kind of fully working product.
      - panic 16y ago
        They originally gave themselves 3 months -- that's a vanishingly small amount of time to produce any kind of fully working product. The first revision of Facebook (then Thefacebook) was written in about one week, IIRC.
stcredzero 16y ago
Some expectation management is in order. A message along the lines like: "We are going to proceed deliberately, in a step-by-step fashion. We are going to start small with X, then add Y and Z.". Then they should then follow that up by releasing early and often.
- ube 16y ago
  I think they provided that but it just wasn't obvious from the current entry of their blog. Check this out: http://joindiaspora.com/2010/04/30/a-response-to-mr-villa.html http://joindiaspora.com/2010/04/30/a-response-to-mr-villa.ht... What do you think?
  - joe_the_user 16y ago
    With all the hype, I actually had really low expectations. But their plan seems really good - do as little practical themselves, produce a good protocol, go from there. I'm look forward to their plan.
bradly 16y ago
Write some code.
- dRother 16y ago
  And maybe hire some experienced programmers/project managers to architect the system first? My experience with the code put out by fresh CS graduates is that it's a bit naive and by-the-textbook, not surprisingly.
  - marak 16y ago
    there is a dearth of quality programmers in nyc who would help im sure
    - seldo 16y ago
      Do you mean a glut, or do you really think there are no good programmers in NYC?
      - benatkin 16y ago
        The "who would help" part is relevant here.
  - mortenjorck 16y ago
    Architecture and user experience. They can afford some consultation time with the best in the business on both fronts right now, and both will be critical to their success.
thefool 16y ago
From my understanding, their plan was to first figure out what they wanted to do before they do it. If I was them, I would spend the next few weeks figuring out what it is their building. Having a blog is probably a great idea for them though.
pc 16y ago
Yishan Wong (early Facebook employee) gave an excellent answer to this question on Quora: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-potential-obstacles-to-Diaspora-catching-on http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-potential-obstacles-to-Dia.... (Quora is still in private beta, but I'd imagine many HNers have accounts.)
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- seiha 16y ago
  I don't, but I'm interested in reading now that you've mentioned.
  - frisco 16y ago
    Email me and I'll send you an invite.
- zzzmarcus 16y ago
  Since when I registered for Quora the TOS said my content could be pasted anywhere as long as there was a link back, I'm assuming it's okay to paste Wong's answer here as well. I couldn't find anything on their site that specifically says what license the content falls under, if someone finds out differently, lmk and I'll remove it. Yishan Wong, Worked at Facebook from 2005-2010. "As it stands, based on available technical and product details, Diaspora is the dumbest idea since OpenID. Whereas OpenID absurdly required you to login using a URL (luckily no longer a requirement) in order to preserve your privacy, which no one really cares about, Diaspora apparently requires you to run your own set of web hosting services in preserve your privacy, which no one really cares about. However, there are a sizable number of people who think they care about privacy, so there is a market for Diaspora. The main problems with Diaspora being a successful parallel social network are: Most women will not use it. See reason #1. Instead, I will describe a product formulation for Diaspora that I believe could be successful and achieve reasonable user adoption, by exploiting interoperability with Facebook while providing user-driven privacy controls. Diaspora guys, are you listening? First, dispense with the personal hosting solution. This is a non-starter out of the gate. Anyone who is willing to run their own hosting solution (virtual or not) should just erase the personal details from their Facebook account, put their content on a personal webpage, and list the address for the webpage on Facebook. In fact, that's exactly what the web was in 1999. Rather, this is how you do it for Diaspora. There are two key ideas: People are unwilling to share personal information according to Facebook's defaults, but there is nothing preventing them from having an "empty" Facebook account populated with none of this personal information. Facebook does not (and cannot, physically) pull information from user accounts on third-party applications. Facebook can do what it will with information entered by users into its website, but information stored by third-party applications can't be taken and used by Facebook. (Technically, Facebook may cache this data in intermediate formats when it is rendered, but they would have to be really deliberately evil to be intercepting this data and using it) Therefore, what Diaspora should do is become a Facebook Connect app. The irony here is delicious - users who wish to use Diaspora as a "privacy-oriented" Facebook will then do the following: Delete all their personal information on Facebook except for their name and perhaps an innocuous profile pic. Use Diaspora to provide all other core Facebook-style services, including the profile info fields. Then, Diaspora renders itself either as canvas page or a profile tab, and displays the user's profile info for the user when other Facebook users browse to that user's page. What this does is it places all of the user's personal information on Diaspora servers, which Facebook can then no longer access and send to third parties. Access control is provided by Diaspora (rendering of the profile tab or canvas pages can be controlled depending on who is viewing it). Users can still interoperate with other Facebook users, so they don't need to migrate their social graph, which is the greatest hurdle to Diaspora's adoption. Diaspora can then offer users the options to store their information in an encrypted format (accessing this smoothly on behalf of friended users will make the product somewhat more complex, but I think it can be done by delegating keys properly), and make available the application code for inspection. They will still have to trust Diaspora's hosting to be running the same code, but I will describe a way to handle that. Diaspora can open-source the code and allow other Diaspora installations to be set up, in case users don't trust Diaspora itself - a particular group of real-life friends who mutually trust each other can just host their own Diaspora installation and store their own information there. They will need to create a new app on Facebook but that's pretty okay - it will become known as a "Diaspora-style" profile if it ever becomes widespread. People will even be able to keep accounts on multiple Diaspora services, for the purposes of segregating their data, if they wish. The codebases for these services will also inevitably evolve and advance. Interestingly, Diaspora does not necessarily need to provide photo hosting, events, groups, and other core Facebook services (but it can). Users can already exploit this property of Facebook not being able to access third-party data by using other photo hosting applications that they trust, and the same goes for all other applications. In fact, this is true today. The irony is remarkable, because much of the privacy worries center around how third-party sites can now access user data, but by flipping this around and placing the user data securely on a third-party site that makes itself a Facebook application, Facebook cannot access that data and thus give it to any other third parties. This is even the case when these third-party sites use Facebook Connect for their authentication, because it still only credentials the site to access Facebook data via API calls; it doesn't give Facebook the ability to pull stuff off of a third-party app's database or anything - the app itself is in control. What is more, users can select the amount of privacy they want to personally protect. To transition, a user doesn't actually have to delete all their profile data off of Facebook (say you don't care if Facebook shares your hometown with the world, but you do care about your relationship status) - deleting all your Facebook data can be laborious. The user just deletes the fields they want to make more private, and transitions only that data on to a Diaspora service. It can then be managed with whatever higher-granularity and/or opt-in access controls provided by that service; the remaining data on Facebook that the user doesn't care as much about can remain under Facebook's dominion. By allowing open-source clone services, every "clique" of users only has to rely on the local nerd to set up an installation, and all of the users in that clique will be able to migrate some or all of their data from Facebook onto their Diaspora service, and continue using Facebook without having to migrate their social graph. Lastly, based on my understanding of the views and temperaments of Facebook's executives (including Mark Zuckerberg), they wouldn't ban this app and would in fact tend to look rather favorably on it, if with a bit of initial chagrin."
frederickcook 16y ago
So, as I understand it, all this money is to work on an open source project, which is quite different than a startup. Now a well-done open source project inevitably leads to a company (Wordpress, MySQL, etc.) but that isn't what they said they were going to do with the money. (Somebody has to host all these nodes for joe-everybody.) Are there contractual obligations of raising money with Kickstarter, or can they use this for legal fees? If they can't use the money for a startup, I doubt they'd have trouble raising money for a company separately, though investors know that any software product developed will be open source.
- seldo 16y ago
  The original request was for $10,000 to cover their living expenses for 3 months. Now they have $170k, they really have no obligation to do anything with it other than support themselves for 3 months. So anything else is just gravy. Which is why it is so COMPLETELY ridiculous that they have been given so much money, especially given that they don't have a product or even a detailed design of a product. They just have a lot of good intentions.
  - gruseom 16y ago
    If it works, it won't seem ridiculous at all. I like the pluralism of this experiment. The odds are nothing will come of it, but that's what the odds nearly always are.
    - sketerpot 16y ago
      They seem to be focusing a lot on infrastructure and APIs, so even if nothing comes of this directly, their efforts can still be useful.
    - seldo 16y ago
      I would have preferred to give 17 teams $10k rather than gamble $170k on these guys. The whole situation is a mess.
rubyrescue 16y ago
original article http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2010/5/13/what-diaspora-should-do-with-their-newfound-fuckyoufacebook.html http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2010/5/13/what-diaspo...
risotto 16y ago
OSS hints: Create a repo Post code Accept patches Tag releases Maybe set up bounties for feature requests? The money kind of fucks up typical OSS dev projects, now that I think about it. But there are more than enough OSS hackers out there that will help. And having a "blessed" project helps too. I'm eager to contribute actually.
kmavm 16y ago
I suspect the first of many lessons Diaspora would do well to learn from Facebook: the hype cycle giveth, and the hype cycle taketh away. Right now, they're hipster Linus times four, getting fawning press coverage, and raking in donations from credulous blog-readers. Several months hence, with nothing that anybody would want to use working*, they may find the media, and many whose checks they cashed, suddenly less snuggly-wuggly.
- theoneill 16y ago
  Raking in pledges, not donations. I wonder what the conversion rate is.
SudarshanP 16y ago
Getting that money would have freaked me out :)) making it impossible to do anything very productive under the glare of such media attention. If I were them here is what I would do: 1. Get organised. 2. Code for 3 months and then stop for some time and keep 10,000$ for the effort. 3. Start an Americal Idol/The Apprentice like program to create actual code in phases. 4. Setup a Jury with 3 luminaries like Bruce Schneier as judges. 5. Opensource projects can participate for bounties to create various pieces of the jig saw puzzle. The entire contest would not involve any actual travel. Just a mob of coders checking into GitHub and Google code and so on. Their own code also gets to participate in the contest ;-). 6. Try get guys like Larry Page involved... LOT of people apart from the poor geek on the street want to see FB dead ;-). Note: These guys are celebrities now. They can easily become notorious. They are young. The best thing for them to do to themselves is to not get a bad name by blowing away the dough. If they keep the money away/use it as a catalyst for the FB killer, they will earn goodwill worth millions. They can "encash that goodwill" over time. With their skills+goodwill they can at a future date start a real startup through a program like YC maybe even in an entirely different domain, and earn fortunes. Their greatest asset right now is that a LOT people will now listen to them for a short time. If they manage to pull it off, even more people who matter will LISTEN to them. That would translate to a lot more than the millions they may raise right now. Wishing them luck. Hope they will be billionares some day. but not from donations, but from a real startup they create in either social networking or another area that really brings value to its customers. Sudarshan.P
puredemo 16y ago
The first thing I would do is hire someone to take care of PR so I could focus on coding.
nl 16y ago
They should look at SocNodes: http://www.socnode.org/ http://www.socnode.org/ In particular, there is some real, actual, working code: http://www.socnode.org/code http://www.socnode.org/code, using PubSubHub for near-instant updates across multiple distributed sites. The code there is in Python, but there is a (my) half-Java implementation linked from there too.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  Looks nice but SocNodes doesn't solve the problem of limiting information to friends. It's a nice simple idea though, and perhaps it could be one layer of a solution.
tezza 16y ago
My advice: Clone Cloud27 [1] and get an initial version for people to play with. Then fill out the more distributy bits later. ---- [1] http://cloud27.com/ http://cloud27.com/ its BSD licensed (IIRC) so should be good to clone/fork immediately source: http://www.djangosites.org/s/cloud27-com/ http://www.djangosites.org/s/cloud27-com/

58 points by derekc 16y ago

I'm perturbed that "Get to work" is number 5. Get to work, build a product. Build a good product. The rest will fall into place.

sketerpot 16y ago
They already have some working code, and they're cheerfully hacking away on it as we speak. So I'd say the Diaspora guys are doing well at this "Get to work" thing. (Diaspora guys, if you're reading this: good luck!)
derekc 16y ago
Should be #1 on that list.
- telemachos 16y ago
  Given how much money they've taken in, I think "Get organized" (i.e., some combination of 1,2 and 4 on the blog) probably needs to go before code. As much money as they received brings its own responsibilities. They already have too much to just write something and then see what happens.
- hugh3 16y ago
  You might think so. But coding is the easiest part of what they need to do. Not only do they need to figure out exactly what feature set they need to implement, they need to have a plan to steal facebook users, a way of scaling up, and a counter-response to any response that facebook might attempt. This can't be a release-and-refine job -- their first version will launch with some media fanfare and unless it rapidly gains momentum it will fail. Writing some code isn't the first step here any more than "fire some bullets" is the first step towards invading a country.
  - wvenable 16y ago
    > But coding is the easiest part of what they need to do. I agree that it's easy, but it's also time consuming. They originally gave themselves 3 months -- that's a vanishingly small amount of time to produce any kind of fully working product.
    - panic 16y ago
      They originally gave themselves 3 months -- that's a vanishingly small amount of time to produce any kind of fully working product. The first revision of Facebook (then Thefacebook) was written in about one week, IIRC.

stcredzero 16y ago

Some expectation management is in order. A message along the lines like: "We are going to proceed deliberately, in a step-by-step fashion. We are going to start small with X, then add Y and Z.". Then they should then follow that up by releasing early and often.

ube 16y ago
I think they provided that but it just wasn't obvious from the current entry of their blog. Check this out: http://joindiaspora.com/2010/04/30/a-response-to-mr-villa.html http://joindiaspora.com/2010/04/30/a-response-to-mr-villa.ht... What do you think?
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  With all the hype, I actually had really low expectations. But their plan seems really good - do as little practical themselves, produce a good protocol, go from there. I'm look forward to their plan.

bradly 16y ago

Write some code.

dRother 16y ago
And maybe hire some experienced programmers/project managers to architect the system first? My experience with the code put out by fresh CS graduates is that it's a bit naive and by-the-textbook, not surprisingly.
- marak 16y ago
  there is a dearth of quality programmers in nyc who would help im sure
  - seldo 16y ago
    Do you mean a glut, or do you really think there are no good programmers in NYC?
    - benatkin 16y ago
      The "who would help" part is relevant here.
- mortenjorck 16y ago
  Architecture and user experience. They can afford some consultation time with the best in the business on both fronts right now, and both will be critical to their success.

thefool 16y ago

From my understanding, their plan was to first figure out what they wanted to do before they do it. If I was them, I would spend the next few weeks figuring out what it is their building. Having a blog is probably a great idea for them though.

pc 16y ago

Yishan Wong (early Facebook employee) gave an excellent answer to this question on Quora: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-potential-obstacles-to-Diaspora-catching-on http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-potential-obstacles-to-Dia.... (Quora is still in private beta, but I'd imagine many HNers have accounts.)

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
seiha 16y ago
I don't, but I'm interested in reading now that you've mentioned.
- frisco 16y ago
  Email me and I'll send you an invite.
zzzmarcus 16y ago
Since when I registered for Quora the TOS said my content could be pasted anywhere as long as there was a link back, I'm assuming it's okay to paste Wong's answer here as well. I couldn't find anything on their site that specifically says what license the content falls under, if someone finds out differently, lmk and I'll remove it. Yishan Wong, Worked at Facebook from 2005-2010. "As it stands, based on available technical and product details, Diaspora is the dumbest idea since OpenID. Whereas OpenID absurdly required you to login using a URL (luckily no longer a requirement) in order to preserve your privacy, which no one really cares about, Diaspora apparently requires you to run your own set of web hosting services in preserve your privacy, which no one really cares about. However, there are a sizable number of people who think they care about privacy, so there is a market for Diaspora. The main problems with Diaspora being a successful parallel social network are: Most women will not use it. See reason #1. Instead, I will describe a product formulation for Diaspora that I believe could be successful and achieve reasonable user adoption, by exploiting interoperability with Facebook while providing user-driven privacy controls. Diaspora guys, are you listening? First, dispense with the personal hosting solution. This is a non-starter out of the gate. Anyone who is willing to run their own hosting solution (virtual or not) should just erase the personal details from their Facebook account, put their content on a personal webpage, and list the address for the webpage on Facebook. In fact, that's exactly what the web was in 1999. Rather, this is how you do it for Diaspora. There are two key ideas: People are unwilling to share personal information according to Facebook's defaults, but there is nothing preventing them from having an "empty" Facebook account populated with none of this personal information. Facebook does not (and cannot, physically) pull information from user accounts on third-party applications. Facebook can do what it will with information entered by users into its website, but information stored by third-party applications can't be taken and used by Facebook. (Technically, Facebook may cache this data in intermediate formats when it is rendered, but they would have to be really deliberately evil to be intercepting this data and using it) Therefore, what Diaspora should do is become a Facebook Connect app. The irony here is delicious - users who wish to use Diaspora as a "privacy-oriented" Facebook will then do the following: Delete all their personal information on Facebook except for their name and perhaps an innocuous profile pic. Use Diaspora to provide all other core Facebook-style services, including the profile info fields. Then, Diaspora renders itself either as canvas page or a profile tab, and displays the user's profile info for the user when other Facebook users browse to that user's page. What this does is it places all of the user's personal information on Diaspora servers, which Facebook can then no longer access and send to third parties. Access control is provided by Diaspora (rendering of the profile tab or canvas pages can be controlled depending on who is viewing it). Users can still interoperate with other Facebook users, so they don't need to migrate their social graph, which is the greatest hurdle to Diaspora's adoption. Diaspora can then offer users the options to store their information in an encrypted format (accessing this smoothly on behalf of friended users will make the product somewhat more complex, but I think it can be done by delegating keys properly), and make available the application code for inspection. They will still have to trust Diaspora's hosting to be running the same code, but I will describe a way to handle that. Diaspora can open-source the code and allow other Diaspora installations to be set up, in case users don't trust Diaspora itself - a particular group of real-life friends who mutually trust each other can just host their own Diaspora installation and store their own information there. They will need to create a new app on Facebook but that's pretty okay - it will become known as a "Diaspora-style" profile if it ever becomes widespread. People will even be able to keep accounts on multiple Diaspora services, for the purposes of segregating their data, if they wish. The codebases for these services will also inevitably evolve and advance. Interestingly, Diaspora does not necessarily need to provide photo hosting, events, groups, and other core Facebook services (but it can). Users can already exploit this property of Facebook not being able to access third-party data by using other photo hosting applications that they trust, and the same goes for all other applications. In fact, this is true today. The irony is remarkable, because much of the privacy worries center around how third-party sites can now access user data, but by flipping this around and placing the user data securely on a third-party site that makes itself a Facebook application, Facebook cannot access that data and thus give it to any other third parties. This is even the case when these third-party sites use Facebook Connect for their authentication, because it still only credentials the site to access Facebook data via API calls; it doesn't give Facebook the ability to pull stuff off of a third-party app's database or anything - the app itself is in control. What is more, users can select the amount of privacy they want to personally protect. To transition, a user doesn't actually have to delete all their profile data off of Facebook (say you don't care if Facebook shares your hometown with the world, but you do care about your relationship status) - deleting all your Facebook data can be laborious. The user just deletes the fields they want to make more private, and transitions only that data on to a Diaspora service. It can then be managed with whatever higher-granularity and/or opt-in access controls provided by that service; the remaining data on Facebook that the user doesn't care as much about can remain under Facebook's dominion. By allowing open-source clone services, every "clique" of users only has to rely on the local nerd to set up an installation, and all of the users in that clique will be able to migrate some or all of their data from Facebook onto their Diaspora service, and continue using Facebook without having to migrate their social graph. Lastly, based on my understanding of the views and temperaments of Facebook's executives (including Mark Zuckerberg), they wouldn't ban this app and would in fact tend to look rather favorably on it, if with a bit of initial chagrin."

frederickcook 16y ago

So, as I understand it, all this money is to work on an open source project, which is quite different than a startup. Now a well-done open source project inevitably leads to a company (Wordpress, MySQL, etc.) but that isn't what they said they were going to do with the money. (Somebody has to host all these nodes for joe-everybody.) Are there contractual obligations of raising money with Kickstarter, or can they use this for legal fees? If they can't use the money for a startup, I doubt they'd have trouble raising money for a company separately, though investors know that any software product developed will be open source.

seldo 16y ago
The original request was for $10,000 to cover their living expenses for 3 months. Now they have $170k, they really have no obligation to do anything with it other than support themselves for 3 months. So anything else is just gravy. Which is why it is so COMPLETELY ridiculous that they have been given so much money, especially given that they don't have a product or even a detailed design of a product. They just have a lot of good intentions.
- gruseom 16y ago
  If it works, it won't seem ridiculous at all. I like the pluralism of this experiment. The odds are nothing will come of it, but that's what the odds nearly always are.
  - sketerpot 16y ago
    They seem to be focusing a lot on infrastructure and APIs, so even if nothing comes of this directly, their efforts can still be useful.
  - seldo 16y ago
    I would have preferred to give 17 teams $10k rather than gamble $170k on these guys. The whole situation is a mess.

rubyrescue 16y ago

original article http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2010/5/13/what-diaspora-should-do-with-their-newfound-fuckyoufacebook.html http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2010/5/13/what-diaspo...

risotto 16y ago

OSS hints: Create a repo Post code Accept patches Tag releases Maybe set up bounties for feature requests? The money kind of fucks up typical OSS dev projects, now that I think about it. But there are more than enough OSS hackers out there that will help. And having a "blessed" project helps too. I'm eager to contribute actually.

kmavm 16y ago

I suspect the first of many lessons Diaspora would do well to learn from Facebook: the hype cycle giveth, and the hype cycle taketh away. Right now, they're hipster Linus times four, getting fawning press coverage, and raking in donations from credulous blog-readers. Several months hence, with nothing that anybody would want to use working*, they may find the media, and many whose checks they cashed, suddenly less snuggly-wuggly.

theoneill 16y ago
Raking in pledges, not donations. I wonder what the conversion rate is.

SudarshanP 16y ago

Getting that money would have freaked me out :)) making it impossible to do anything very productive under the glare of such media attention. If I were them here is what I would do: 1. Get organised. 2. Code for 3 months and then stop for some time and keep 10,000$ for the effort. 3. Start an Americal Idol/The Apprentice like program to create actual code in phases. 4. Setup a Jury with 3 luminaries like Bruce Schneier as judges. 5. Opensource projects can participate for bounties to create various pieces of the jig saw puzzle. The entire contest would not involve any actual travel. Just a mob of coders checking into GitHub and Google code and so on. Their own code also gets to participate in the contest ;-). 6. Try get guys like Larry Page involved... LOT of people apart from the poor geek on the street want to see FB dead ;-). Note: These guys are celebrities now. They can easily become notorious. They are young. The best thing for them to do to themselves is to not get a bad name by blowing away the dough. If they keep the money away/use it as a catalyst for the FB killer, they will earn goodwill worth millions. They can "encash that goodwill" over time. With their skills+goodwill they can at a future date start a real startup through a program like YC maybe even in an entirely different domain, and earn fortunes. Their greatest asset right now is that a LOT people will now listen to them for a short time. If they manage to pull it off, even more people who matter will LISTEN to them. That would translate to a lot more than the millions they may raise right now. Wishing them luck. Hope they will be billionares some day. but not from donations, but from a real startup they create in either social networking or another area that really brings value to its customers. Sudarshan.P

puredemo 16y ago

The first thing I would do is hire someone to take care of PR so I could focus on coding.

nl 16y ago

They should look at SocNodes: http://www.socnode.org/ http://www.socnode.org/ In particular, there is some real, actual, working code: http://www.socnode.org/code http://www.socnode.org/code, using PubSubHub for near-instant updates across multiple distributed sites. The code there is in Python, but there is a (my) half-Java implementation linked from there too.

joe_the_user 16y ago
Looks nice but SocNodes doesn't solve the problem of limiting information to friends. It's a nice simple idea though, and perhaps it could be one layer of a solution.

tezza 16y ago

My advice: Clone Cloud27 [1] and get an initial version for people to play with. Then fill out the more distributy bits later. ---- [1] http://cloud27.com/ http://cloud27.com/ its BSD licensed (IIRC) so should be good to clone/fork immediately source: http://www.djangosites.org/s/cloud27-com/ http://www.djangosites.org/s/cloud27-com/