6 ms·

Its really hard to get any idea of what this platform actually is. I had to read the whole blog post to even get a hint of what the platform is supposed to do f

by apalmer 14y ago

Its really hard to get any idea of what this platform actually is. I had to read the whole blog post to even get a hint of what the platform is supposed to do for me, and was left with more questions than answers: 1) Is this a centralized platform hosted in your 'cloud'? 2) Is this a decentralized set of libraries/framework/libraries that I deploy myself? 3) Am I still in the situation of building my business on your platform and when your business goals change I have to worry about you disabling my application? I really should be clear on at least these main points after reading the blog but I am not, I am guessing that all three are true, but I really am not 100% sure.

EGreg 14y ago
OP here. Well, first off I should say that there are many sides to a platform. The blog post was meant to give an overview of what today's social apps have in common, and how things could and should be done better. You'll hear a lot more about it in the coming weeks. The list there is just an overview of what sets our platform apart from everything else out there, and what makes our team excited to work on it for the past 2 years. We believe we're making a difference. And the size of our user base lets us really test if we're right, and iterate until we hit our goals. If you want to learn more about our business strategy and what our long term roadmap looks like, get in touch with us, or follow us. We are not yet at the stage where we are inviting other developers to build on our platform. We are building it out for ourselves and our users. That said, you're correct. These are valid concerns and you can only learn about these kinds of things as the platform gets opened up and policies get put in place. Pay attention to the incentive structure of the platforms you are building on, and you will have answers as valid as ones the platform developers themselves can tell you. The short and simplistic answer to your question is that, IF everything goes as we plan, in a few years this will be a completely decentralized social network (think Wordpress of social networks), that does right by its users and developers.
- hackernewsfan 14y ago
  Something like WordPress + bbPress (or your own solution) = DiasporaProject.org?
  - EGreg 14y ago
    Well, Diaspora definitely was a project I was aware of -- I had started a year before those guys put up a kickstarter page. They were undergrads in the same school I went to - Courant at NYU. So yeah it was a good idea. But you probably won't believe how much planning and architecture went into a project like this. This is far beyond simple status updates and sharing. As far as being distributed, we were just careful that all the data was stored by one or another "publisher", so we can scale up as far as we need using sharding. In the future we plan to make a distributed communication protocol between the nodes so they don't have to trust each other. We applied for a patent on some aspects of a distributed social network: http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20120110469 http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20120110469 so you can read about some things that went into it there, although the patent is mostly for having defensible IP to show investors, as well as the possibility of licensing that stuff to Google+, etc.
- troymc 14y ago
  These ideas are similar to the 'personal cloud' concepts being advanced, for example, by members of the Respect Network [1]. Are you associated with them or a similar organization? [1] http://respectnetwork.com http://respectnetwork.com
  - EGreg 14y ago
    I've seen a few personal cloud startups present, but I haven't had a close look at Respect Network. I think personal cloud is in its infancy, and in a few years we'll have redundant encrypted data stored on many different servers where only we can access it using our key. When that happens, we'll want to integrate it with our platform, but until then, we're focusing on the other aspects: user signup, contact management, invitations, granular access controls, subscriptions and filters, offline notifications, realtime collaboration, scalability, working on any device, etc. These are hard problems to solve and now that we've built something that solves all of them in one place, we think we have something valuable.

by apalmer 14y ago

EGreg 14y ago

OP here. Well, first off I should say that there are many sides to a platform. The blog post was meant to give an overview of what today's social apps have in common, and how things could and should be done better. You'll hear a lot more about it in the coming weeks. The list there is just an overview of what sets our platform apart from everything else out there, and what makes our team excited to work on it for the past 2 years. We believe we're making a difference. And the size of our user base lets us really test if we're right, and iterate until we hit our goals. If you want to learn more about our business strategy and what our long term roadmap looks like, get in touch with us, or follow us. We are not yet at the stage where we are inviting other developers to build on our platform. We are building it out for ourselves and our users. That said, you're correct. These are valid concerns and you can only learn about these kinds of things as the platform gets opened up and policies get put in place. Pay attention to the incentive structure of the platforms you are building on, and you will have answers as valid as ones the platform developers themselves can tell you. The short and simplistic answer to your question is that, IF everything goes as we plan, in a few years this will be a completely decentralized social network (think Wordpress of social networks), that does right by its users and developers.

hackernewsfan 14y ago
Something like WordPress + bbPress (or your own solution) = DiasporaProject.org?
- EGreg 14y ago
  Well, Diaspora definitely was a project I was aware of -- I had started a year before those guys put up a kickstarter page. They were undergrads in the same school I went to - Courant at NYU. So yeah it was a good idea. But you probably won't believe how much planning and architecture went into a project like this. This is far beyond simple status updates and sharing. As far as being distributed, we were just careful that all the data was stored by one or another "publisher", so we can scale up as far as we need using sharding. In the future we plan to make a distributed communication protocol between the nodes so they don't have to trust each other. We applied for a patent on some aspects of a distributed social network: http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20120110469 http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20120110469 so you can read about some things that went into it there, although the patent is mostly for having defensible IP to show investors, as well as the possibility of licensing that stuff to Google+, etc.
troymc 14y ago
These ideas are similar to the 'personal cloud' concepts being advanced, for example, by members of the Respect Network [1]. Are you associated with them or a similar organization? [1] http://respectnetwork.com http://respectnetwork.com
- EGreg 14y ago
  I've seen a few personal cloud startups present, but I haven't had a close look at Respect Network. I think personal cloud is in its infancy, and in a few years we'll have redundant encrypted data stored on many different servers where only we can access it using our key. When that happens, we'll want to integrate it with our platform, but until then, we're focusing on the other aspects: user signup, contact management, invitations, granular access controls, subscriptions and filters, offline notifications, realtime collaboration, scalability, working on any device, etc. These are hard problems to solve and now that we've built something that solves all of them in one place, we think we have something valuable.