yet hear virtually nothing about Diaspora or Status.Net being used in similar ways to impact the lives of millions of people. It's because all this software is

yet hear virtually nothing about Diaspora or Status.Net being used in similar ways to impact the lives of millions of people. It's because all this software isn't done yet, is severely underfunded, undermanned, outnumbered and outgunned by the proprietary systems. That isn't stopping any of us from pushing forward, but when the runaway success of our crowd (Diaspora) raised only $200k, to expect that we can immediately compete with the likes of Facebook or Twitter is simply unrealistic. I know we're all doing our best, most of us are volunteers with little to no funding, and we're up against some of the top engineers in the world with billions in venture capital. But we're all still plugging away. Open source is nothing if not tenacious.