Well it was a good technological intention, trying to make an open standard for social networking applications, to maybe open new roads for non-facebook develop

Well it was a good technological intention, trying to make an open standard for social networking applications, to maybe open new roads for non-facebook developers. Maybe doing a web app was not the good idea though. The problem with facebook, is that devs can't access the data directly, but users can. It's also an API wall for developers who might have an idea and join the party. The only people to decide what new thing to do and experiment are the people at facebook. It's kinda odd, because the internet is supposed to be an open thing. They have this huge database of users, and all I see is some strange smartphone home app and some homepage redesigns, nothing really new since the website release. I mean as a tech, chatting is not a new thing, facebook just created another chatting protocol. People just chat using facebook instead, instead of sharing their AIM or MSN. That's why diaspora is cool, at least nobody has real direct authority on your data except the users, or at least it diminishes the link between the host and the user. It's more on the dev side. What sucks, is that the only real standard thing on the web is the mail. It's the backbone of online identity, it's still there. What can't we do the same for web applications ? The web was not meant for applications of the scale of facebook. Maybe we need finer, grainier ways of exchanging social data. Diaspora was not only about privacy issues, it also wanted to show people maybe there are other things to do with social network than just... commenting pics, chatting and joining groups about whatever thing. And seriously, facebook is a success because it appealed to basic stuff like this. Why can't some programmers have the ambition of making other things with social networking, and not being called stupid for trying so ? I mean if a guy Zuckerberg did not put a little effort, there would never have been facebook. I heard a former diaspora dev killed himself. That's not towards success, but nobody really cares either. It's like wanting innovation is a sin or something.