| This code was written by a bunch of undergraduate college students. This is hiring a bunch of interns (with near zero experience) to implement your product, giving them three months, and then being shocked -- SHOCKED, when the code is not professional grade quality. I was shocked when everyone and their brother was willing to shell out money to a group of completely unproven college students to produce a distributed open source 'Facebook Clone', that is also 'private'. My inclination is that the 'distributed' and 'private' parts of the description push it into the oxymoron tier of product specifications. I would have expected this alone to give people pause about what the architecture would be (somehow it didn't). Honestly, at least they have produced something, and for the most part, it works. Hopefully they haven't burned through too much of the $250,000 that they started with. 3 months of development time is honestly nothing. Presumably, they could get comments on this, throw the entire thing away, re-write while fixing the various issues, and be well beyond where they are now in another three months. (If this is as bad as Steve says, I hope this is the case). Presumably the development will go faster because previously they were learning and developing at the same time (presumably). Hacking together a prototype that you then throw away is a perfectly reasonable development model. I'm impressed (and pleased) that they have produced anything. |
They mention at least two large cost items - luxr (basically consulting by Janice Fraser, it says around $10k on the company page) and pivotal labs. Pivotal is the huge one, I once got a quote from them on a project I was working on and they basically said they don't do less than 6 figures. So unless they got some kind of insider discount, the back-of-the-napkin math says at least half of their cash is gone.
Whether it was worth it or not is a separate matter. As a resume builder for a young team: sure, why not, you could do a lot worse. As a product for end users: you might support their cause, it depends on whether you're 1) a Facebook-hating neckbeard-sporting privacy nut - excuse me, libertarian, or 2) willing to cut them slack on an early release because there's some interesting technical challenge they're tackling.
For everyone else: no thanks, Facebook's fine and we'll stick with the real thing.