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Diaspora Developer Release
- jhawk28 16y agoGithub repo: http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora Looks like they are using Ruby/Rails and MongoDB.
- bborn 16y agoDemo: http://tom.joindiaspora.com/ http://tom.joindiaspora.com/ user: tom password: evankorth
- joshfinnie 16y agoSeems very slow... Not loading for me.
- a_m_kelly 16y agoI've gotten in and things are loading, but slow. That the thing is still running at all seems nice given the ass-kicking I suspect their servers are likely receiving.
- mikemol 16y agoIt looks like someone created an account named "Mark Suckerberg" and automated a posting flood repeating the text "I accidentally.. the whole economy". Also, said account's avatar looks like some kinda of three-way orgy. Not investigating that image farther...
- mikemol 16y ago...And that just happened to be the account you log in as. Changed the name and image. I'm sure someone will change it back.
- jlongster 16y agoHaha, I like that the last commit on most of those files are "Spell our own name right."
- davidu 16y agoI'm impressed and surprised that they have released code. I worried that the initial flurry of money and hype would derail them. Many projects never get this far, and for this, they deserve to be commended. They've built something and dealt with a lot of external pressure at the same time.
- neurotech1 16y agoApparently they spent some of the money on working with LUXr and Pivotal Labs. The best technical solution can be derailed by a poor user interface and experience. It looks like they avoided that. See earlier update for more information; http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/08/26/overdue-update.html http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/08/26/overdue-update.html
- eob 16y agoI just downloaded and ran the project, and to be honest, I didn't see more UX work than what could have been done in an afternoon's worth of googling around for some templates.
- jarin 16y agoYou obviously haven't noticed all the touches like being able to drag files into the browser to upload them (Gmail-style)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- deno 16y agoThat's for super-power-users, maybe in 5 years for advanced users. If you attempt to do this with either unsupported browser or on unsupported website your browser will act very non-userfriendly, like by opening dropped file. Because of this it would be foolish and dangerous to even inform the vast majority of users of this feature. From my observation their UI is just copied Facebook UI. And my issue with this is not lack of originality. Rather it's the fact that people will now compare Diaspora functionality with that of Facebook. Furthermore anything working differently will lead to frustration, as certain behaviors are expected.
- jat850 16y agoIt looks surprisingly advanced, from a screenshot perspective - more than I admit I would have given them credit for. Is there additional insight into what "aspects" are, though? It confuses me - will it confuse an ordinary user?
- happybuy 16y agoI'm guessing they should have just called aspects "groups". From what I can tell, they are just groups of users which you can publish particular content/updates to.
- eavc 16y agoWould that be confusing to use that terminology since groups was recently a staple of facebook with a very different meaning?
- lindsaypea 16y agoAgreed. "Groups" or "Circles".
- Dunbar 16y agoI think they are supposed to represent 'aspects' of your life.
- EGreg 16y agomaybe they're streams
- cheesy_lamar 16y agodouble rainbows
- pkulak 16y agoWhen you make a new account you get "home" and "work" aspects, which you can add people to individually. That actually goes a long way to making it clear.
- wwortiz 16y agoFor some reason I thought that development was being done in php. Other than that I'm somewhat dismayed that their open source release isn't actually running on some site and says run at your own risk due to security issues. Edit: (Looks like there is a demo in the comments here but not open to sign up) Hopefully development continues quick enough that it escapes into the public before the tech hype is gone.
- thinkalone 16y agoI also thought it was going to be in PHP - they definitely mentioned that at some point, but once I saw their website was written in Ruby, I suspected they might be moving in a different direction... Good to see they hit their release date, and I look forward to messing around with it, even though I know more PHP than Ruby ;)
- jlgbecom 16y agoAppleseed and Elgg are both in PHP, if you're looking to help out with an open source social networking project.
- thinkalone 16y agoI've installed and played with both, but I'm still not sure how things will develop if social networks become more "distributed." Ideally, in my opinion, sites sould be able to run any social software, whether Appleseed, Elgg, or Diaspora, and they could all interconnect and push updates to each other, somewhat similar to the many available options for blogging software all syndicating via RSS. I'm glad that there has been so much interest and publicity surrounding Diaspora, since it will benefit this new type of social networking and help it grow, now matter what platform or language each client is built on!
- kacy 16y agoI don't want to be that guy, but this looks a lot like Virb from a few years ago (http://static.arstechnica.com/VirbActivity.jpg http://static.arstechnica.com/VirbActivity.jpg). Good on them though for releasing! This looks like a solid effort. I wish them the best. :-)
- sahillavingia 16y agoI'm kinda over this. Where's Diaspora Instant?!
- andymoe 16y agoI wonder how hard it would be to get running on a small heroku instance just for fun...
- tedkimble 16y agoWell I believe heroku includes ImageMagick by default, so it seems the only dependency would by MongoDB. Has anyone ever used the MongoHQ add-on? http://addons.heroku.com/mongohq http://addons.heroku.com/mongohq
- zachrose 16y agoIt's funny, since hearing about Diaspora I understood it as your own portable web app that people run on something like Heroku for non-developers.
- alttab 16y agoYou may be on to something there.
- andrewacove 16y agoYep. It's easy to get started. I wrote a lightweight logging system on top of it before I switched to logworm.
- steveklabnik 16y agoI am currently using it for the Hackety Hack site. It's pretty easy to use, check it out: http://github.com/hacketyhack/hackety-hack.com/blob/master/configure.rb#L13 http://github.com/hacketyhack/hackety-hack.com/blob/master/c...
- cmelbye 16y agoEDIT: Upon further investigation, I've found that one dyno is not enough to run Diaspora on Heroku. You'll quickly start filling up your request queue and it will slow down to a crawl. It works. heroku addons:add mongohq:free Then apply this patch to make Diaspora use the correct Mongo server and database: http://gist.github.com/581833 http://gist.github.com/581833
- xelfer 16y agoThey really need to do something about that name. They seem to be having trouble with it themselves: http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/708e9f88a55cc37130f93cc47b820f62fbf48d2d http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/708e9f88a55cc3713...
- mlinsey 16y agoYou're unfortunately right. I say unfortunate because I really, really like the name: it sounds good and conveys their mission very well, but ease of spelling is probably paramount.
- a_m_kelly 16y agoI'm not so sure about the name. I understand how it conveys their mission exactly and it does that really well: leave facebook(or twitter or wherever), come here. I can see how setting themselves up from word 1 as opposition to facebook has a huge amount of importance but what happens to that branding on the off chance they win? (I know this is like planning where to put the swimming pool in your 1 bedroom apartment in the event that you win the lottery but I think the choice of name does/did have a lot to do with just how long the view of the founders was when they started.) That said, it is currently my only quibble. I'm glad to see that things actually got done and out the door. It sure seems to have gone a lot better than anything I worked on this summer.
- mlinsey 16y agoA diaspora isn't just about leaving a place and going somewhere else; it means roughly "a scattering" in Greek and means that a group of people are leaving one central homeland and going all around the world. Even if they win, the distributed nature of their network makes the name perfect.
- queensnake 16y agoI dunno. Nintendo survived 'wii'.
- Kadin 16y ago
- patio11 16y agoSweet Jesus. Please publish a security reporting page at the earliest possible convenience, because this will have private info on it within a day from now, and that is a very bad idea right now.
- dandelany 16y agoWhat? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like they're just releasing the source code, not taking new users for "the" Diaspora or sharing access to any kind of central database of users. It's just a ruby web app you can download and run locally (or on a web server if you're that dumb...), right? And in that case, how is this any worse than the hundreds of other bits of (unsafe, untested) social networking code floating around the interwebs?
- tel 16y agoBecause it raised $200,000 from random web benefactors. It has quite a bit more pull and expectation than those unwashed hundreds.
- patio11 16y agohow is this any worse than ... is a question which would be better to answer privately, to a security contact. Use your imagination as to what the email would likely say. This may just be a difference of philosophy, but I don't think "It isn't really a release, so nobody would be stupid enough to actually run this on a publicly accessible server." After all, consumers of The New Hotness have a lot less incentive to think through the security implications of running it than the developers did. [Edit: And the developers apparently have a publicly accessible instance running. That decision is curious.] This will be running in production today. If very bad things happen, the TechCrunch article about it will have Diaspora in the headline. That is enough of an incentive to have a security page.
- dandelany 16y agoThanks for the response. I agree that a security page is a good, even necessary idea, it just doesn't strike me as a pressing emergency for them at the moment.
- vault_ 16y agoIt seems to be AGPL licensed. I'm wondering how that will affect adoption.
- bl4k 16y agoI think that since the community funded this project that the code should have a more liberal license so that the community can do what they want with it. The project also depends on MongoDB, which is also AGPL licensed, which raises the question of if paid hosting of a diaspora instance is 'commercial' and if it requires a MongoDB license from 10gen, I would think that it does. They should BSD/MIT license their own code, and build more storage options outside of MongoDB. I am surprised that donors didn't insist on a license as part of the kickstart funding.
- warp 16y agoThe AGPL (like the GPL) does not allow adding more restrictions. You do not need any further license to use AGPL licensed code in a commercial product, you just have to abide by the license terms of the AGPL. I assume the 10gen commercial license allows you avoid having to provide source code for your product to your users. (but the mongodb website isn't clear about that).
- mathias_10gen 16y agoWe try to be very clear about licensing: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Licensing http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Licensing. Please let us know if there is something on that page that needs clarification. I would like to make it clear that users of MongoDB don't need to opensource their product, only their changes (if any) to the MongoDB server itself. The commercial license is mostly for companies that have strict (if misguided) "no AGPL" policies. Most users do not need it.
- jarin 16y agoYou can always use something like MongoHQ, they've already paid the commercial license and 16MB is plenty for mucking about on your own.
- holman 16y agoWhat Diaspora really needs now is some startup, some well-known developers, or the Diaspora crew themselves to stand up and say "Okay, now we're going to use this framework to build a very real social network." Until then, it's just some people building out some cool ideas. Don't get me wrong, that's great; it's just hard to rally around it without getting something concrete behind it.
- thinkalone 16y agoI'm not sure what the end product will look like or what the functionality will be, but when I think of "distributed social network" I'd like to see something like a HN node, a reddit node, a Digg node, a Slashdot node, etc., where they all communicate with each other and aggregate updates from all those platforms, so that if I make a comment or submit a story on one site, it shows up on the "social network" part of my profile across every other site. A bit like FriendFeed, I suppose. If large sites adopted it in that way, it could certainly become a "very real social network."
- jmspring 16y agoWith the distributed instances, the focus on data portability, and open source nature of Diaspora one real use case that comes to mind is: - Diaspora would make a "social" add on to other sites, ie, just one component of larger specialized sites. Rather than creating "plug ins" for Diaspora, Diaspora becomes a plugin itself. It will be interesting to see how it evolves.
- templaedhel 16y agoI would like to see (and if I get the time, or a client who needs it I will look into creating) a dispora plugin for wordpress, as opposed to that dreaded buddypress. It (to me) would have the same appeal as disqus etc with you being able to use the same account to connect across the web, with different "seeds".
- brandnewlow 16y agoWhat's wrong with Buddypress? Never heard a bad word about it myself. Haven't used it either, though.
- melvinram 16y agoThey are building social networking software which means that at some point the goal will need to be to get everyone and their mother on board. Because they built the app on Rails, they are now facing an uphill battle with distribution as there are not a lot of places that you can easily setup a Rails site. I love Rails but for this type of app, it might have helped them gain traction faster if it was built on PHP, or was even just a massive plugin for WordPress. Now if a lot of people really seem to love Diaspora and demand for Rails hosting increases dramatically, I'm sure hosting providers will take note and increase their commitment to Rails. That would be an ideal situation, but not a likely outcome.
- there 16y agoi don't think the end goal is to get everyone to be running their own server. the data will be distributed among many different servers but surely there will be providers that come along to host data for large groups of people.
- melvinram 16y agoSure, the goal might be to have everyone on own installation of it but it would be a reasonable expectation that a lot of people would want their own installation (as demonstrated by WordPress.org's bazillion downloads per micro-second) since part of the promise is owning your own data.
- zacharyz 16y agoCompletely agree with you. I was expecting to be able to throw it up on a random shared host, now this won't be possible. Oh well hopefully it will work on Heroku.
- steveklabnik 16y agoWith such cheap VPSes, do people still use shared hosting nowadays?
- deleted 16y ago
- Vishnevskiy 16y agoI was kinda of expecting more with a funding, an office, and a semi large team. I have personally been working with my co-founder with zero funding on a MMORPG social start-up that brings the best features of Facebook to another group of people. We have implemented real-time features through Erlang (including Chat and Streams), data collection/aggregation from games, and far more. (http://www.guildwork.com/blog/ http://www.guildwork.com/blog/ if anyone is interested, its our public testing site, we have not launched). Anyway I guess my point was if 2 people with zero funding and no office can accomplish that, I certainly expected more from them. But to be fair we been killing ourselves slowly by working as hard as we do, maybe they took a relaxing approach. =P Also for something that is meant to be distributed Rails does not seem like a very good choice. Just my 2 cents, hopefully open sourcing it will pick things up.
- mikemol 16y agoIf you aren't familiar with "The Mythical Man Month", you should probably acquaint yourself with it.
- Vishnevskiy 16y agoIn my perspective I was leaning more toward having funding for a designer (I assume they paid 10k for http://luxr.posterous.com/ http://luxr.posterous.com/ or got it free). I am not a designer, but since we have not hired one, I am the one doing the designing and ending up spending more time then I should and hating what I come up with. I am also the main engineer on our project so thats time I could be putting to making code/features better. Money and more help can solve some problems.
- pdelgallego 16y agoWhy you didn't take a third partner? I think a designer=that-can-code or a developer-that-can-design make things happen faster.
- Vishnevskiy 16y ago
- rscott 16y agoI'm sorry, but for $200k+ funding you need to do more to impress me than throwing a bunch of gems together and putting it on MongoDB. I like the minimalist design, though.
- toddynho 16y agoit's not like 200K has gone into what they're releasing now. 200K needs to last them for a while :) in my book, it takes balls to release something this early. so, kudo's to them.
- alttab 16y agoDon't understand the down voting - for the crowd's investment its arguably all they've done. They did just start however. Releasing at all is more than most expected on their blogs.
- kmfrk 16y agoThey didn't ask for $200k+, and I'm sure they're figuring out how to spend the money as they go.
- seltzered 16y agoIf possible, I want to start a project/patch to do full-screen photo slideshows (a la flickr). I may try setting it up if I have a chance, I'm assuming the packaging of it all will take time before it becomes something a layperson can just run on an extra windows machine.
- pkulak 16y agoCan anyone explain to me what an "aspect" is?
- steveklabnik 16y agoIt seems to be just like a 'group,' or an 'interest.' An 'aspect' of your personality that you'd like to share with others.
- pkulak 16y agoThat's a really good idea. I post stuff to Facebook all the time about college football, but I know a lot of peole don't care about that and just want the baby pictures... and vice versa.
- mark_l_watson 16y agoGood job on the cool stack checklist: Rails 3 (check), Haml generated HTML5 (check), nicely laid out Rails app (check), uses MongoDB (check). As long as I am praising, I'll add a thumbs up for using AGPL: IMHO a very good license choice.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- mark_l_watson 16y agoBTW, from just grabbing the code, it looks like: use Ruby 1.8.7, not 1.9.2, have a local mongod running, bundle install, bundle exec thin start. Looks nice.
- mark_l_watson 16y agoAlso, need to: rake db:seed:tom Then login: tom passwd: evankorth App really looks nice so far.
- jpwagner 16y agoi don't understand their vision and sifting through their blog posts and faq for 5-10 minutes did not teach me. can anyone articulate it?
- seanieb 16y agohttp://vimeo.com/11099292 http://vimeo.com/11099292
- hammerdr 16y agoMany of the exciting[1] new open source projects seem to have a huge focus on UX. I love this. Open source has always seemed to have a stigma of 'unusable' and these initiatives are really going against that notion. Diaspora, jQueryUI, SproutCore, Cappuccino.. [1] I use exciting not as personal excitement here but by the community excitement around these projects. Whether its press coverage, developer buy in or user elation.
- jlgbecom 16y agoThere are a bunch of open source social networking projects out there. One is Appleseed, which has been in active development since 2004, open source since 2005, and has had four releases in the past 3 months. http://opensource.appleseedproject.org http://opensource.appleseedproject.org For all the attention Diaspora is getting, the other projects will be usable by average users way before they will.
- SingAlong 16y agothere was something called "AroundMe" which was at first the usual walled-garden social network software. But then they changed their philosophy to make it like what Disapora is now. I guess it started sometime in 2005. I edited the older version of their software to setup my own social network. http://www.barnraiser.org/aroundme http://www.barnraiser.org/aroundme Runs on php and mysql. I did checkout AppleSeed longtime back version 0.2 or 0.3 (on savannah i guess). Clean code. Barnraiser's AroundMe has plugin functionality built in. It's not the facebook-type third-party app API. So don't get me wrong.
- sjtgraham 16y agoHad a 5 minute glance at the code. I don't think they realise that `self` is the default receiver in Ruby, judging by how many times I saw it used superfluously. Anyway, kudos to them for actually releasing some code. I would like to contribute, does anyone know if they are accepting patches?
- RossM 16y agoAs far as I know they're accepting patches through github - fork away :)
- danieldon 16y agoSome people like to use explicit self to differentiate methods from local variables. Also, there are consistency issues. Explicit self is required for attribute writers and implicit self can call private methods on parent classes. Personally, I'm not a big fan of implicit self.
- look_lookatme 16y agoIt may be superfluous technically, but it could be coding standard on their part to eliminate any confusion. It's not that far of a stretch.
- EGreg 16y agoI've been following this project for a while - these guys are from my school :) Very awesome to see a bunch of undergrad guys come up with this project. I'm still amazed at the PR they got at the time. I'm also kind of working on my own thing ... http://myownstream.com http://myownstream.com If you set out to make a private social network, though, it's not that easy. Now, instead of trusting facebook, you'll have to trust ALL of your friends' hosting providers. For example, with diaspora, someone at mediatemple can in principle peek at the contact details you have synced with any of your friends. How is that any more secure? What this is, is decentralized. Which is still really cool!
- mark_l_watson 16y agoYou are right about having to trust too many different hosting companies or people who install it and make it public, but there should be a way to tunnel directly through to another user with everything in the middle just seeing an encrypted data stream. However, how about a simpler scenario: you set up on one of your servers and only invite your family to join. Another instance for a club, etc. Have a very easy export/import mechanism to push material in your account in one group to another, under your control.
- EGreg 16y agoTheir app is running on someone's hosted server. You can of course have complete security BETWEEN servers (as these guys say "PGP for you privacy nerds") but ... you still have to trust everyone's hosting company. A single hosting company hosting 1000 diaspora accounts can compromise details of 127,000 accounts, if each diaspora user has 127 friends on average. As far as setting up social networks on a server, there are plenty of those ... dolphin, elgg ... and they are quite good. If you want it to be decentralized nodes, you are stuck trusting everyone's hosting providers to not peek at the data you are sharing. Which imho is worse than trusting only facebook in terms of privacy. On the other hand in terms of everything else, decentralization is a huge WIN! Such as scaling and uptime.
- smoody 16y agoMongodb is an interesting choice. I haven't used Mongodb, so I might be misunderstanding a design decision made by the Mongodb developers, but isn't it possible to get into a situation with Mongodb where the writes are delayed and, as a result, new records (documents) added to a database might not show-up on the following reads (so a user might post a status update, but then he/she might not see it added to his/her status updates page when the pages reloads). Or perhaps the Diaspora developers decided to commit writes to the disk immediately at the cost of performance? Just curious.
- steveklabnik 16y agoWith a distributed social network, I'd imagine that it's okay if data is a second or two out of date, so it should be cool. > but then he/she might not see it added to his/her status updates page when the pages reload Even if it were to happen, you're assuming a page loads when they make a comment. ;) This shouldn't happen until there are extremely high loads, but even then, just don't make the comment box reload the page, insert the comment into the DOM, and make your POST with AJAX. ;)
- mcgyver 16y agoInteresting to see it released under GPL3(+). Looks like they want any distributed modifications going back to the community.
- cmelbye 16y agoHere's a public server for trying it out: http://openspora.com/ http://openspora.com/ Running stock Diaspora code, but it's got a LOT of problems (which is to be expected from pre-alpha software I suppose.)
- gosuri 16y agoYou can access the demo version http://trydiaspora.com/ http://trydiaspora.com/ , my user is g@trydiaspora.com
- ErrantX 16y agoLooks ok, not as good as I was hoping (though I realise they are working on back end stuff). Fancy front end things, though, are just overkill at this point. Next they must nail the interface or people will not use it. Random example; "all aspects" needs to change to something else (or they need to aggressively teach people what an aspect is).
- Maro 16y agoIf it's true that for a social network to be successful it needs some quick growth at the beginning to have a critical mass, then Diaspora is in trouble. They're in trouble because they release non-usable alpha versions of their code, loose the buzz ("Diaspora released another version today, X works now, but it's still not good enough to replace Facebook."), and by the time they have a 1.0 version nobody's going to care. I'm saying it might not make sense to develop software in an open-source manner whose existense relies of viral growth of users dependant on a one-off buzz generated when the 1.0 is released.
- bertil 16y agoFirefox seems to have survived this — with targeted buzz on big launch days.
- daleharvey 16y agothats a pretty big if, almost the entire customer development program is aimed towards proving that if isnt true
- Maro 16y agoWhat customer development program?
- daleharvey 16y agoSorry, terrible wording, customer development process / methodology / idea etc.
- Maro 16y agoMy question was, does Diaspora actually have such a process? It seems to me their approach is to get power-users like HN folks on-board first. Conveniently, we are also the users who would run servers for our friends or do a startup that would do Diaspora hosting. But that's my point. If we keep seeing these alpha releases, it will loose the buzz, and it'll never reach critical mass / momentum. Eg. this release is so minimal, I really don't care. Tell me when it's 1.0.
- skbohra123 16y agoare diaspora guys on HN ?
- benlangfeld 16y agoI'm really disappointed to see that the team has decided that instead of learning about an existing standard (XMPP) which fits the purpose perfectly, they've decided to begin defining their own protocol, which will go down the same path but with less rigour and a whole lot of wasted time. Eventually it will have to be trashed in favour of something more robust. If that's what they've spent the last three months working on, they've had some bad advice. I thought Pivotal were all about "just get the damn thing done" and so would have encouraged them not to waste their time.
- jwf 16y agoi really wonder how long the "community" is going to humour these developers. it's really about time we realize that a bunch of people got tricked into giving some students a bunch of money to hack on a fun project over the summer because they were led to believe that it would be something more than it ever was going to be. they failed to produce anything useful, or even a good starting point for a larger project. they have made poor decisions, have been far-from-transparent, and i don't see how anyone in their right mind would want to hop on board and commit a bunch of their time to this project. is it just the publicity? how long can everyone ride that, and why would anyone with a clue think that's a worthwhile endeavour. i've read through the developer mailing list and it's a bunch of arguments that essentially boil down to opinions about what this project "should be", and technical discussions by admitted non-experts about topics that are extremely fundamental to the success of this project. with 200K, and a boatload of exposure, they could have spent the summer consulting with experts, planning a viable solution. but they didn't (nor did they ever imply that they would, so no surprise here). i don't mean to sound elitist, but a viable global social networking platform should probably be designed by experts. i'm not trolling, i'm hoping that people will read this and go "oh yeah, maybe my time could be better spent on other projects", instead of blazing onwards without looking at the big picture.
- imf 16y agoWe are indeed all about being pragmatic. I think a lot of our pragmatism has rubbed off on the Diaspora folks, but do keep in mind that we're not really advising them in any formal capacity. (Other than the occasional conversation over breakfast, or when they ask about ideas.) I'm sure if you asked them about their choices, they'd be very happy to take in new ideas. Not to speak for them, but I think they're just trying to get a concept out and iterate on it. I think Ship it Squirrel would approve.
- jarin 16y agoI just patched Diaspora to work on Heroku, if anyone wants to do that: http://github.com/jarinudom/diaspora/ http://github.com/jarinudom/diaspora/ I submitted a pull request but I think they are asleep :)
- Robin_Message 16y agoGiven that "Anyone who would letterspace lowercase would steal sheep" -- that font style is not a good sign in a security product ;-)
- weego 16y agoIf you're building something you expect people to be able to install themselves, surely your #1 priority would be to not build dependencies that regular hosting can't provide.
- Croaky 16y agoWhat's up with their contributor agreement? https://spreadsheets.google.com/a/joindiaspora.com/viewform?formkey=dGI2cHA3ZnNHLTJvbm10LUhXRTJjR0E6MQ&theme=0AX42CRMsmRFbUy1iOGYwN2U2Mi1hNWU0LTRlNjEtYWMyOC1lZmU4ODg1ODc1ODI&ifq https://spreadsheets.google.com/a/joindiaspora.com/viewform?... That seems pretty wacky. The patent section in particular seems random and unrelated.