4 ms·

This is the reason why I could never understand why Google seemed intent on promoting Wave as a fancier version of email or why they focused so much on the tech

This is the reason why I could never understand why Google seemed intent on promoting Wave as a fancier version of email or why they focused so much on the tech demo UI. Under the hood, Wave was a federated XMPP network with privacy controls and the ability to move arbitrary data around. It had all the underpinnings not of an email killer, but of a distributed social network. I was really excited about the potential of the project at the time, and came to be incredibly disheartened by the way nobody seemed to realize that the fancy placeholder UI wasn't where the actual interesting technology was. ETA: OneSocialWeb was another project predating Diaspora that was a distributed social network built on top of XMPP: http://onesocialweb.org/developers-xmpp.html http://onesocialweb.org/developers-xmpp.html

gatlin 15y ago
If only the marketing of Diaspora could have been combined with the technical details of OneSocialWeb. Facebook is great because it "gets" what average folks want and need. It being centralized is a huge boon and while a few folks bitch about their privacy, very few people actually care. That isn't to say privacy concerns aren't legitimate - they are - but I know most of my peers just want to see pictures and read up on the latest news. Facebook is dead simple to use, requires nothing to get started, and has inertia. It won. Many people on this site idolize Steve Jobs, so do what he would do: 1. Acknowledge that Facebook won its game 2. Start playing a different game. You're spot on about Wave. Wave had the potential to be the next wave of communication (ugh), and they set their sights on probably the one standard that will never be disrupted, instead of trying to disrupt a relatively new segment. Wave should have been a social collaboration platform. I know that all I use Facebook for is communicating with members of my co-op, and we all could have easily moved our house business over. Instead, they blew it and we use Facebook for organization, scheduling, and collaboration.

gatlin 15y ago

If only the marketing of Diaspora could have been combined with the technical details of OneSocialWeb. Facebook is great because it "gets" what average folks want and need. It being centralized is a huge boon and while a few folks bitch about their privacy, very few people actually care. That isn't to say privacy concerns aren't legitimate - they are - but I know most of my peers just want to see pictures and read up on the latest news. Facebook is dead simple to use, requires nothing to get started, and has inertia. It won. Many people on this site idolize Steve Jobs, so do what he would do: 1. Acknowledge that Facebook won its game 2. Start playing a different game. You're spot on about Wave. Wave had the potential to be the next wave of communication (ugh), and they set their sights on probably the one standard that will never be disrupted, instead of trying to disrupt a relatively new segment. Wave should have been a social collaboration platform. I know that all I use Facebook for is communicating with members of my co-op, and we all could have easily moved our house business over. Instead, they blew it and we use Facebook for organization, scheduling, and collaboration.