[jaysonelliot]

I've never been too bothered, as a user, when one product "borrows" a great feature from another, especially if they manage to deliver a better experience.

I've had high hopes for Diaspora. Gave them cash when they were on Kickstarter. Tried hosting my own Diaspora server. Waited for the devs and the community to do something with the $200,000 they raised.

Certainly a lot of hackers have done much more with much less.

In the year since Diaspora was announced, though, not much has happened.

Ask anyone in the general public if they've used Diaspora, and you're more likely to get a confused "what's Diaspora?"

At the end of the day, there's really only one measuring stick for a social service: users. We use social sites to communicate with our friends and followers. Facebook is deeply flawed, but people have stayed there because people were staying there.

G+ looks like the first real opportunity for people to leave Facebook without losing the connections they've become addicted to. If G+ is going to be the new default for sharing online, I really just want three things.

1. Let me control my data and my privacy.

2. Play nice with other sites, protocols, and standards.

3. Provide a great user experience, including "borrowing" from other places when it makes sense.

[mgkimsal]

"Certainly a lot of hackers have done much more with much less." +1 insightful.

At the risk of repeating myself, the Diaspora team had a great opportunity to do something more than put out rails code. With that money, they could have done the hard work of coordinating real world meetings with various existing projects to hash out federation issues, schema differences, etc., and been able to get dozens of indie social networks to agree on a common standard.

Yes, it's a pipe dream, but there are already dozens of decent SN platforms out there - we didn't need one more, we needed a way to make them all talk and exchange appropriate data. The big thing holding back many of them seems to be time/effort to coordinate the cooperation. There may be some NIH in there too, but Diaspora was just more one contribution to the NIH pile.

Much thought/work had already gone in to the problem space - using the $200k to help unite that previous work would have been far more productive than another Rails app.

[michaelchisari]

they could have done the hard work of coordinating real world meetings with various existing projects to hash out federation issues

Actually, StatusNet did a great job with that, organizing the Federated Social Web Summit in Portland last summer. I was there (Appleseed), so was OneSocialWeb, Gnu Social, Diaspora. It was good times.

[mgkimsal]

thanks for pointing that out.

[TheOnly92]

"Who" came up with the idea is not important, it's the "Who" who made the idea useful for others, is what matters.

[sebbi]

Why is facebook "deeply flawed"?

@1. you can do that on Facebook, too ... they even have "circles" there, too

@2. facebook is the champion of playing nice with other sites, just look around you ... everything is facebook nowadays

@3. facebook borrowed a lot and you can filter everything everywhere.

So maybe their UI isn't as clean as Google+ and they lack a great video chat, but other than that, why should anyone switch to yet another social network which does the same ... once was enough for many people, now that everyone and their dog is on the leading network there is no incentive to switch away.

Google+ is coming to late to a party that started years ago and will suffer the same fate as other Google products: only geeks will use them, no matter how good they are (Wave :/) ...

[Khao]

Facebook plays nice with other sites? Have you seen the dozens of news about Facebook developers having their app banned for no reason and with no explanation? What about user accounts being terminated with also no explanation and for no reason (this happened to my account once, and Facebook takes weeks before answering you!)

Facebook is a nightmare, it's built around the concept of spam but since all your friends are on it, you have to be on it. Every app tries to force you to click on things you don't want, so that they will end up in your news feed and attract more sheep. Every few months, they add a new concept that raises tons of questions about privacy and yet their default settings is almost always to allow every user into the new thing (think auto-tagging via facial recognition). The best part of all? They don't even tell you there's a new feature and that YOUR PERSONAL privacy settings have been set to "allow all" for that new feature.

I have been waiting for something like G+ to kick facebook in the face for so long, now I only need an invite!

[bad_user]

     Google+ is coming to late to a party
     that started years ago

That maybe so, but the party was well underway when Facebook arrived.

I'm also not sure what problem Facebook (or social networks) solve, that email, your IM account and your phone with its contacts list do not.

Where I live most Internet users are also users of Yahoo's IM. I've been reading the status messages of my friends, interacted with them, getting back in touch and all that - for years before Facebook became popular. Yahoo's IM is still the most popular form of communication between my friends, although all of them are also on Facebook.

My current IM account is 11 years old, my mobile phone number 10 years old, my email account is newer since I migrated to my own domain and my name is searchable on Google -- every one of my acquaintances I ever had know how to get in touch with me and do so.

And that's Facebook's flaw; Facebook was once cool, now it is getting more popular because it is popular; but a good communication medium it ain't

[dkarl]

They have "Circles" on Facebook that let you restrict status updates? If so, most users are ignorant of them. The most common Facebook complaint that Google+ has provoked among my friends is the need to keep their status stream safe for work, grandma, etc.

I know that Facebook Messages can be targeted to groups, but they aren't really the same thing. Messages aren't designed for sharing; they're designed for, well, messages.

[rowanseymour]

@2 By "playing nice" do you mean taking over? Can I export any of the information I put into Facebook into different sites? Can I use my Facebook email address with a different client?

[timmyd]

I agree also. I also think we all need to appreciate the fact that 99% of the world uses Facebook BECAUSE it is a agnostic platform. I have a Gmail account - most of friends "lay persons" in the tech world - use Yahoo or Hotmail, and sure, some use Gmail. They check Facebook on their mobiles and website daily - they don't particularly care about [or even know really] the "wars of technology companies"

Facebook works. All their friends exist on it - it does everything they could possibly want it to do "connect to their friends". In my mind - it's "Google and Bing" all over. Bing works and is arguably just as good as Google these days yet everyone continues to use Google.

Google+ - great for technology people who want to "control their data". Most of my friends don't even understand what "exporting data for portability" even means. They use Facebook, see their friends posts, upload photos, check-in to places and they love that.

It's going to take a LOT MORE "innovation" to move them across to another platform because "it's new, pretty and contains some nifty features that Facebook already contains or will contain in the next 3 months of 'lock-down' in response to Google+". I'm not on Google+ [outrageous request for invite via my profile :D] - but I just can't see my friends moving to it - particularly when they don't even login to Google anyway when they are searching.

Facebook will "win" in my mind - because they are agnostic to email and that's where your "connections" lie and the reason you use Google "mostly" [outrageous generalization again] is because you host your email on Gmail.

[eavc]

Google+ will succeed because it's simpler. Everybody wants to control their data and have online relationships that mirror real ones in terms of context. You think mom's don't worry about who can see the pictures of their kids? Or non-technical professionals don't worry about whether or not it's safe to add your coworker to your friends list?

Facebook makes that process tedious. Google+ bakes it in to the foundations and at every step in an obvious way.

[ilir]

une dua te vjedh pare ne poke r dhe du hacker te behm

[p4bl0]

I completly agree. Also, I think it would be really fun that Facebook implement video chat using Google's open technologies and make it compatible, just to say "meh" to Google.