[agentultra]

The trouble is that they were so ambitious but lacked any experience from which to chart those ambitions. They're just a bunch of young twenty-somethings just getting out of school. They haven't built any large-scale real-world security-hardened software yet.

More than the fact that the code isn't production ready (by a long shot it seems), I'm just surprised the released anything at all. Perhaps spending all that money on those consultants was a good thing for them. I doubt they would've been able to get by on their own given what was released and the hype they set in motion. It's a lot to live up to. They made some really bold claims.

Just goes to show that you can't just talk the talk and watch your dreams come true.

[raganwald]

The trouble is that they were so ambitious but lacked any experience from which to chart those ambitions. They're just a bunch of young twenty-somethings just getting out of school. They haven't built any large-scale real-world security-hardened software yet.

Thank God that our industry isn't lousy with ambitious but inexperienced twenty-somethings. If we let them run amok, we'd get crapware like MS-DOS and computers like the Apple II.

[Volscio]

What were these kids thinking, starting some ambitious software project from scratch without much of a clue how to do it? This is unheard of on the internet!

[agentultra]

I don't see what point you're trying to make.

My point is that their problem is other peoples' expectations. Their ambition set the bar before they'd written a single line of code. Had they been more humble and waited to ask for a handout afte they had released what they have now I don't think there would be half as many articles hitting HN about how crappy their software is.

I think that they released something is great. I would never put some one down for having ambitions and aspirations to follow them. I would simply advise that they keep those ambitions to themselves and let their actions speak for them.

[Volscio]

I think the "ambitions" you're ascribing to them are based on your own interpretation of events. They sought a little seed money (what was it? $4k?) to try to do something pretty cool. They happened to do it at just the right time and rode a wave of publicity and enthusiasm. Now people like you are saying, well they should have planned it better. Well, they should have released a more mature project before begging for handouts. Well, they should have let security experts do it.

They didn't plan this. But they're giving it a shot.

Haters gon' hate.

[jarin]

If anything, the hype might end up making some other better implementation actually have a chance of succeeding. If anyone else out there was thinking about doing a distributed social network, now's your shot at the limelight. You've got about a week to come up with a basic OStatus-based social network in Rails that isn't full of security holes.

[jlgbecom]

There's a ton of them, and they're all pretty mature. I'm hoping this does have a windfall effect on the ones that have already proven themselves from a code standpoint, and could use the hype that Diaspora has

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org

http://www.onesocialweb.org

http://www.gnu.org/software/social

http://www.elgg.org