I think the lack of delivered milestones and need for more money indicates that this team with the current vision will likely always need more money to deliver

I think the lack of delivered milestones and need for more money indicates that this team with the current vision will likely always need more money to deliver "the vision". I think of the group that got pissed off at the Twitter client announcement months back and went out and built http://rstat.us http://rstat.us in a weekend (a very rough deployed prototype). Since then they have been hacking on it making it nicer and nicer to use. It is actually a really compelling replacement for Twitter; just without your social circles yet. A project like Diaspora, with the charter that it has "take on Facebook" is too big to try and fund without a benevolent dictator at the helm, executing a singular vision. That project either needs to be driven by the community as an open source project (again, with a singular dictator driving it) or it needs to be rolled up into a tight company vision with a first round of funding to get a deployment up and running with a wall, photos and messages and then move on from there. I was annoyed to see the lack of updates on their product page and so many annoyed/angry donatees pissed off with the lack of updates. More money isn't going to fix this. I am almost certain I could give them $500k and in a year and a half be here again with a rewritten back end and a request for "just a little more funding".