Profiting from Anti Facebook Sentiment

Four young coders are tapping into public resentment of centralized social web services with Diaspora, a distributed social tool they plan to hack out this summer.

My reaction is mixed.

Part jealousy. At the speed and social proof these guys have achieved by saying they’re going to build a tool. I haven’t been able to successfully pitch prototypes of similar tools and concepts to investors who would own a large share of the resultant business. With over 83k raised in just a couple of weeks with absolutely no investor strings attached, the Diaspora team has tapped into the public far more effectively than I had imagined possible. I found out early this morning in a well thought post from my friend Ronen that my favorite blogger has broadcast his financial support for the project (disclosure he has invested in Kickstarter).

Part respect. They’re doing everything right. They’re crowd sourcing funding for a distributed social web tool which they’ll open the source for as the summer goes on. I understand and respect what they’re striving to establish: Removal of the social middleman and attention tax for large scale social web communication.

Part concern. This isn’t the first time a new group decided to replicate the functionality of a centralized social network using open social protocols and standards. I actively followed open friendfeed after Facebook acquired the friendfeed company, and it has yet to gain any real traction almost a year later. Identi.ca leverages Status.net software to achieve an open form of Twitter but their social network has had a very slow growth that hasn’t achieved wide spread adoption. There are other open social implementations that good friends have developed:

  • OpenMicroBlogger is a suite of tools developed by all star hacker Brian Hendrickson.
  • RedRob.in is my cofounder Tyler’s Rails implementation of Status.net compliant social software, leveraging source he derived from OpenGard.in. “It’s a fully ostatus compliant micro blogging platform I built in rails”

Overall I wish the young team great success, and hope they can leverage some of the tools and communication protocols that other folks have developed over the past few years.

In the comments I mentioned node.js without carefully reviewing the server code. I got a better understanding after reading the documentation and watching this presentation by Ryan Dahl

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  • manielse

    Very well said Mark. I too share jealousy, respect and concern for almost the same exact reasons. But I wish them well, gave them some money and hope to have a product that I can use, modify and contribute to. Will it be a Facebook-killer? No, but it gives us new alternatives or compliments today's centralized apps.

    As I said to Matt Asay yesterday, I would love to see a “Boxee Box” or “PogoPlug” styled appliance that you attach a USB hard drive to and magically become a seed or personal hub. If businesses can have appliances and internal clouds, why can't consumers?

  • http://theinnovationist.com/ James Fuller

    I'm not exactly jealous, maybe a little bit, but it's just that they look like art-students rather than computer scientists. They got the funding, but there are issues that make what they are attempting to achieve even harder than trying to gather users to an open service. They seem to want users to have control of the physical seed, which isn't going to help in seeing adoption. They could actually handle this without having to have physical seeds, as it's been done before, in several of the distributed systmes. My personal favorite is an Open FF POC form for real-time, PSHB, distributed interaction, http://www.socnode.org/dev.

    I'm sure we'll see something come from them, but will it be something that people will use, is my biggest question. I just don't see a general consumer moving towards, this, they'll be grabbing early-adopters first, but even then adoption will be lower. Until they get a turnkey service opened, the success of the project is limited. Though what Manielse said about the usb appliance, would make it greatly simpler, they seem to want full-fledged machines.

  • http://arnoldwaldstein.com awaldstein

    Hi Mark

    Respect I get…the test of success, early on for an entrepreneur is just moving the needle in some way…funds or prototype or support.

    Jealousy I get sort of…everytime I see something done that I was just thinking about doing or in the process of, I could say “great but that might have been me”. Don't feel this way much anymore.

    Concern, less so…Building something new is a bunch of blips and fits and starts. More start than finish and it always changing. The market sorts everything out.

    But Mark!…Keep pushing my friend…melancholy is not a poise I see often on you.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Appreciate the heads up on OpenFF. I was thinking Dia may go with
    something like node.js

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Just a momentary distraction, melancholy takes too long to set in on
    my spirits. Besides I have too many inspirational friends and far too
    much to do dwell on anything less than beauty and success

  • http://theinnovationist.com/ James Fuller

    Node.js would be an interesting way of implementing it.

    As far as OpenFF, it has gone through much change, do to members either getting bogged down by work, drifting away from the service, or the various changes of what it will be implemented in. Not having a clear development team, hasn't made it hard or as important, I adopted the API work, but it's fallen to the way side, sadly.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    That would be killer distribution. Me clouds. Have you checked out
    node.Js? It has some simplistic beauty for distributed social
    architectures

  • manielse

    I want to see OpenFF, Diaspora and any other solution succeed. But ideally, I like all of them to work on standards or at least gateways so that they all can work together somehow. I have my doubts that this would happen but the Open Source Community should support both their respective distribution and other Open Source projects as much as possible. In the social networking case, number of users is a key factor for effectiveness so it makes each project stronger by integrating in some form.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    I hope for maximal interoperability, and specific style from each open social tool. The freedom to customize coupled with the value in communication.

  • Leland

    Mark, I understand your jealousy completely. When we see individuals or groups of people that are given the red carpet treatment when it hasn't been earned, it's easy to see the innate unfairness of the world. In this case, diaspora was simply making their pitch at exactly the right time. The backlash against Facebook's privacy policy is massive right now, and people are looking for tangible ways to get back at “The Man”. Contributing money to a project that voices those people's own complaints is the most direct way that people can express their anger.

    I would anticipate that unless Facebook continues to trample over peoples privacy for the next few months, this project will end up exactly the same as all of the other “open social” products that you have listed here. The herd mentality of the media and even the blogosphere has a very short attention span. And so, after even one or two weeks I think we are going to see the diaspora team drop off the radar in terms of who cares about what they are doing. As you said, they have not actually produced anything except expressing ideals that run contrary to what Facebook is doing.

    Thus, we can learn a lesson from this. Positoning and timing *can be* extremely important when dealing with a small company like a startup. If you launch as soon as a void that needs filling opens up, you can become rich and famous. A direct real-life parallel to this truth can be found by examining the events immediately following the breakup of the soviet union. Those Russians who had connections and a moderate amount of power AT THAT TIME were able to grab everything from the rapidly dissolving state around them.

    At any other time, those people would never have been able to increase their wealth and power so quickly. Accordingly, startups also benefit from timing and positioning.

    The only sure way to avoid a reliance on timing and luck in a new product is simply to work your ass off and create something that has genuine value and utility in some aspect of our lives. Most mid-level companies that make a few million $ a year come from this seed. Most of the massive companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (almost) have also sprung from this seed, but they have also benefited from lucky timing and positioning.

    Luck is just a fact of life, and it really is the difference between a runaway success, and just a good success. The sooner we accept this fact, the sooner we can become more at peace with ourselves and disperse the illusion of instant riches and fame being possible for every startup.

    Thanks for your article Mark. : )

  • Leland

    Mark, keep going no matter what. If what you makes brings value to our lives, it will be successful (to what degree, I don't know ^_^). These groups of people that happen to cash in on current sentiments of people are just small flashes in a sea of talent and entrepreneurship. Just think of diaspora as being a bunch of kids who won the lottery. :)

  • Leland

    Node.js is awesome. I think the existence of all of these alternative social projects that have progressed so far, but have not reached any meaningful audience highlights the extreme importance of PR, marketing, and SELLING a project.

  • http://steamcatapult.com/ Dave Pinsen

    I saw the tweet from Fred, but had forgotten that he had a stake in Kickstarter. It would be nice if he gave a shout out about Victus Media to his tens of thousands of Twitter followers.

  • Pingback: Waves, Timing and Becoming Real

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Well said Leland. I appreciate the timing of this group's pitch, and the utility of crowd sourced funding with some media juice.

    “Working your ass off and creating something of genuine value”, that's music to my ears.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    It's just a matter of timing. When we're ready for additional attention, we just may get it.