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If 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'r
by Maro 16y ago
If 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.
- jarin 16y agoIt's gonna be tough to do a Diaspora hosting startup with it being AGPL-licensed.
- steveklabnik 16y agoWhy? Look at Heroku; they us all off the shelf software for 90% of their components. People will always pay for convenience.
- sandeepshetty 16y agoAnd in diaspora's case, customizations for your community.