What Happened To Diaspora, the Facebook Killer? It's Complicated 215
pigrabbitbear writes "Created by four New York University students, Diaspora tried to destroy the notion that one social network could completely dominate the web. Diaspora – 'the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network,' as described on their Kickstarter page – offered what seemed like the perfect antidote to Zuckerbergian tyranny. The New York Times quickly got wind. Tired of being bullied, technologists rallied behind the burgeoning startup spectacle, transforming what began as a fun project into a political movement. Before a single line of code had been written, Diaspora was a sensation. Its anti-establishment rallying cry and garage hacker ethos earned it kudos from across an Internet eager for signs of life among a generation grown addicted to status updates. And yet, the battle may have been lost before it even began. Beyond the difficulty of actually executing a project of this scope and magnitude, the team of four young kids with little real-world programming experience found themselves crushed under the weight of expectation. Even before they had tried to produce an actual product, bloggers, technologists and open-source geeks everywhere were already looking to them to save the world from tyranny and oppression. Not surprisingly, the first release, on September 15, 2010 was a public disaster, mainly for its bugs and security holes. Former fans mockingly dismissed it as 'swiss cheese.'"
Fondue party! (Score:5, Insightful)
> Former fans mockingly dismissed it as 'swiss cheese.'
One has to wonder how cheesy the first few iterations of Facebook would have looked if their source had been open to all.
Re:Fondue party! (Score:5, Insightful)
> Former fans mockingly dismissed it as 'swiss cheese.'
One has to wonder how cheesy the first few iterations of Facebook would have looked if their source had been open to all.
If I'm not mistaken, Facebook's beginnings didn't involve advertising all over the damn place and firing up a bunch of technology pundits before a single line of code was written. Facebook's code might've been (and probably still is) janky as hell, but the first impression they left on the world when Zucko started was a working product. That's the key difference here. The Diaspora people wanted media attention for their idea, and the lack of anything deliverable for years was the impression everyone had of them.
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Yup, you have to complete at least your first iteration... then refactor it like hell for the next... ad infinitum.
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Well, they weren't intending to advertise nearly as widely as they did. I wouldn't fault the project creators for what happened.
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Re:Fondue party! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Then it is still your friends' fault, not Facebook's. Either don't tell sensitive information to friends, find better ones, or just become asocial.
Re:Fondue party! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fondue party! (Score:5, Insightful)
one that takes my private information and gives out to anyone willing to pay for it
First, the information YOU GAVE to them is arguably not necessarily private. And no, they don't give it out, you're being an idiot or an intentional dick.
I'm tired of being oppressed by facebook
Black slaves were oppressed. Gays in the deep South in the 1950's were oppressed. The Jews in Germany during WWII were oppressed. Facebook is NOT fucking "oppressing" you, maaaaan.
Re:Fondue party! (Score:5, Insightful)
I for one doubt that the problems are of technical nature. What they did well was to get a lot of people excited and start a well-sized fellowship of power users interested in hosting a dispora server.
The problem is that it is a student project that intended to start from zero and kept largely to itself. That's fine for a student project. If you want to open up social networks to heterogeneous environments though -- like emails -- you have to connect to other programmers and entities interested. You have to settle one one or a couple of competing standards (like was done with RSS) used for interchange with wise designers, several servers should implement functions, code should be shared.
Finally you have to have some killer application that draws users -- doing the same as Facebook but in a different color won't do it. And if it's just a game that's only available there.
So the current status as far as I followed is that the communication format is settled (RSS based) and what's left is implementing many nice web servers that interact, have different awesome features, and also to get commercial players involved? It's hard work getting from a working prototype to a good implementation that is hackable (and ideally, not crackable).
Writing good software (Score:5, Funny)
It's almost like there's more to writing good software than throwing up a Kickstarter page and getting PR. Who knew that actual work would be involved?
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I'm certain the people who started the project were well aware that work would be involved. You can't fault them for other people's unrealistic expectations.
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Well, the project is still going strong. I've been keeping tabs on it from afar, waiting until I felt it was likely safe and reasonable to bring up my own seed.
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The "unrealistic expectations" is what they hyped themselves on delivering to the world.
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I disagree. They presented an idea of what they wanted to accomplish and where they wanted to go and why they wanted to go there. That idea resonated with a lot of people. Yes, they wanted to build a replacement for Facebook, but everybody else expected an immediate Facebook killer that everybody would immediately be able to jump to. The real world doesn't work like that. Even if their initial version was flawless it would still necessarily have had limited functionality (what can actually be accomplished i
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My theory of the problem is that a walled garden will always provide at least a little smoother experience than a decentralized, open, free one. Thus usenet gave way to moderated web forums, decentralized email largely gave way to centralized webmail providers and twitter, home pages gave way to myspace/facebook, and beowulf clusters gave way to EC2. Open standards and decentralized implementations ar
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You could equally argue that proprietary standards have largely given way to open ones. For example any web technology or video codec wanting to become popular online will have to be open and free. Even Flash is dying in favour of HTML5 and SVG.
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Value-added services naturally close down, media channels naturally open up.
Re:Fondue party! (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with your other points, however I do think a lot of their problems were technical in nature.
The submission nails it.. bunch of kids with limited real world experience. The whole execution was amateurish and it really showed.
For instance, their problem with security wasn't that their software has some security holes, or a lot of security holes.. it was that the fundemental core design didn't take security into account at all. Good security creates a low level priviledged layer that you audit the crap out of, with upper layers limited (by a token based auth system for instance.. ), such that a bug in an upper layer is limited in what it can do. They just threw in some if statements and called it a day. A big selling point was supposed to be security.. but it was very clear to anyone who actually looked at the code that they didn't have a clue what they were doing. It is impossible to make an app secure the way they went. You can patch all the holes.. but the fundemental structure is insecure so new holes will be introduced constantly.
As programmers, we all look at something and say "pff, I could do better". Maybe we do it less as we gain more experience in seeing simple stuff turn wildly complex. This seems a case of that where some kids did that, then got way more attention then they should, and ended up looking like idiots.
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For instance, their problem with security wasn't that their software has some security holes, or a lot of security holes.. it was that the fundemental core design didn't take security into account at all.
Mod this right up. If you want to design an open social network then the FIRST thing you do is design a protocol and get security experts to review it. Then you get two (or, ideally, more) teams to implement the protocol independently. Then, once you've identified the flaws in the specification, you have something that may work. Diaspora started with a crappy implementation where the protocol documentation was the code. The fact that their implementation sucked was made much more important by the fact
Technical Capabilities vs. Social Critical Mass (Score:2)
I haven't tried Diaspora, but while they did need to get the technology to be marginally adequate, so they don't alienate users, their biggest hurdle was going to be to get users to adopt it in the first place. The reason to join Facebook was never that it was technically cool, it was that it was at least marginally usable and half a billion other people were joining it, including your relatives and you actual in-real-life friends and the people you went to high school with and the people who you used to k
Re:Technical Capabilities vs. Social Critical Mass (Score:5, Interesting)
You missed the early phase of Facebook when it was cool because it was only for colleges, had a clean layout (unlike the ugly pages people frequently had for MySpace). It was exclusive and pretty.
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It's a great name for a hard-SF RPG, though.
we weren't looking to them.. (Score:2)
that was their own PR for their own use.
don't do pr like that before you have the product. in this case they didn't even have the thinking for what the product would be, except that "facebook suxxor".
seriously, if people cared they could go for telnet bbs's with message networking between the bbs's. but who the fuck would like that shit? and those who care are already running their own blogs on their own money, their own bbs systems for organizing, their own jabber servers... but most people just don't give
Facebook (Score:5, Funny)
Ironically, its Facebook page [facebook.com] probably has more likes than actual users.
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That IS irony. Coincidence is what is most commonly mistaken for irony, and there's no coincidence here. The irony stems from the fact that people are liking Diaspora in greater numbers on a site which is closed and ideologically-opposite to what Diaspora stands for.
You could argue that Diaspora shouldn't even have a Facebook page if it wishes to be whole consistent in its values, but if you want Facebook users to come over, you need some kinda of presence.
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You're right about t
Facebook Killer? Sensation? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only place I ever heard Diaspora even mentioned at all was right here on Slashdot.
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The only place I ever heard Diaspora even mentioned at all was right here on Slashdot.
Same here, and I forgot about it since it was a late night and just remembered when I saw today's article.
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I've seen it mentioned a few other places. A maker space I follow debated hosting a Diaspora instance. A few other people I know have talked about it spontaneously.
But it didn't (Score:3)
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Since everyone with a gmail address is on g+ it includes my mom, father in law and wife who have no idea it exists
By the end of the year I might even add my mother in law and wife's grandparents. Except with them they won't even know they have gmail. I'll use it just for iPhone contact management for them
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Since everyone with a gmail address is on g+...
Not so fast! You have to explicitly sign up for G+ to use it, just like with Google Latitude's location sharing. Otherwise you're not searchable and they just consider you a non-member and keep urging you on here and there. I've never liked the model of joining a free service to increase visualization of details that are free anyway, especially within an account I already signed up for. You must sign up before you are able to replies to public profiles' posts, I believe, but I won't risk joining just to fin
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All new gmail sign ups are automatically signed up for G+ at the same time, there is no option to not enable it at that point.
Once you've created the new Gmail account you then have to go back into the murky depths of account management and cancel your account to G+ if you don't want it.
Get with the times (Score:5, Informative)
This is a completely sensationalist and somewhat deceptive post.
First of all, those security bugs existed in the first release, before Diaspora even went open-source. Discussing Diaspora's first bugs without mentioning its current project status is like complaining about the first release of Linux when Linux 3.6 just came out. The author is deliberately leaving out information about the current status of the project in a way that is intended to further a deceptive conclusion in the reader's mind.
Second of all, check out http://diasp.org/ [diasp.org] because it seriously works.
Third, Diaspora is still being developed by its community.
Fourth, Diaspora had the equivalent of the "circles" feature before Google+ did. In fact, the first release of Google+ looked so similar to Diaspora that people started to talk. And acting like Google+ somehow made Diaspora irrelevant is totally stupid. Apples and Oranges. Big Data and decentralized social networking. They have different purposes and therefore can't be directly compared.
Quit with the sensationalist tech journalism. I don't even use social networking much any more, but considering the friends I know who swear by Diaspora, I know its far from the idea of "a few young kids" creating a failure, which is what this stupid article champions.
Re:Get with the times (Score:4, Insightful)
Is creating an alternative to Facebook a technical problem, or is it more the non-technical side which is more important? Such as making people aware it exists, encouraging people to use it etc. This thing may be great, but nobodys heard of it. What are its supporters doing to make people hear about it? There are people who use facebook who never email, hardly ever surf the web etc.
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I think it's awesome. Lots of big social groups have a person or two who is good enough at computers to host a pod. From there, you only need to sign up your friends into your pod. Then establish inter-pod relationships. Done. Remember Fidonet? Same idea, but with the internet.
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I'm on Diaspora, and I'm glad it's there. The people are certainly much more eclectic and there are less of them - both plusses in my book. :-P Facebook didn't take off because it was open to everyone initially. It took me a while to score an invite. Still, it doesn't need to be a raging success. It just needs to host interesting creative communities, and to Be There if/when Facebook et. al. have a Chernobyl.
Frankly, when the masses arrive small communities can lose their charm... loss AND gain. Le
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Creating an alternative to Facebook isn't a technical problem, Google are probably better technically than Facebook, but they can't do it.
Creating an alternative to Facebook which actually delivers even the tiniest sliver of what Diaspora was supposed to deliver(secure, decentralized and functional without requiring mom and pop to host their own) is a technical problem, probably an insurmountable one.
So Diaspora essentially set themselves up with a technical problem they couldn't solve and a non technical p
Re:Get with the times (Score:5, Interesting)
I use Diaspora. I thought -- and think -- it's eerie just how much G+ looked like diaspora, and to some extent still does. They're both working off the same mindset about how networking should function. But once G+ came up, activity in my diaspora circles dropped to a standstill. It appears to me that most all the people who would use diaspora chose to spend their limited time on G+ because of the networking effect.
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When the current status is somewhere between "completely unknown" and "utterly forgotten"... the conclusion the author is intending to depict is an accurate one. Whether it's functional, or on version 3.0 or version Jelly Vanilla Gummy Bar - it's failed to perform it's intended function, let alone the that hyped into existence by the tec
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Diaspora had the equivalent of the "circles" feature before Google+ did. In fact, the first release of Google+ looked so similar to Diaspora that people started to talk.
If they'd obtained patents, Disapora would have had an edge over Google. Instead, they lost.
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This is a completely sensationalist and somewhat deceptive post.
There will always be plenty of this whenever an open source threat emerges to somebody's billion-dollar monopoly, and most people will buy into it without questioning where the memes are coming from.
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So what's the difference between https://diasp.org/ [diasp.org] and https://joindiaspora.com [joindiaspora.com]? I made a login at the latter site and it doesn't work with the former. Is it now a fractured community?
No, it uses different "pods", or diaspora servers. These pods communicate with each other, hence the "decentralized social networking" description. You set up an account with one pod, but you can communicate with people on other pods. You can search for a person faster if you know what pod they're on. I have an account on diasp, so my address is [username].diasp.org, which could help you find me if you're on another pod. As far as I know, all pods achieved federation some time ago, so this shouldn't be a pr
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Diaspora? (Score:2, Insightful)
By the way, the name, Diaspora, it also sucks. Oh, and I don't have an FB account either but it has a better name.
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facebook? sounds like facepalm.
Tahrir (Score:2)
The Tahrir Project [github.com] is trying to create an anonymous microblogging platform, similar to Twitter or Facebook. Google was sponsoring development on it over the summer so with any luck it won't prove to be vaporware like Diaspora.
G+ killed it (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, the battle may have been lost before it even began.
No it was lost when G+ came out with circles, which was Diasporas main killer feature.
The second killer feature being able to download all your stuff, which google ALSO does on "your account" "data liberation" page.
Honestly when I first saw G+ circles I though the almighty GOOG had bought out the diaspora devs or something like that.
the team of four young kids with little real-world programming experience
It is/was a kinda-federated intranet scale website, OK? They're not writing a OS, or a compiler, or hand coding machine code. In the olden days, one young kid should have been able to do it, four is a little excessive.
LiberTree (Score:5, Interesting)
Diaspora has spawned other projects that attempt to carry on and refine the original goals. LiberTree [libertreeproject.org] is one of them, for instance. Just because the original team didn't succeed brilliantly doesn't mean that the original goals weren't worthy or attainable.
Friendica vs Libertree vs Buddycloud (Score:2)
I am the most basic user here, only able to clumsily setup a php/MySQL script.
I quickly read the how-to for all three LiberTree, Friendica and Buddycloud.
Honestly, I am capable to install Friendica, and absolutely no other, would it be just because I only handle shared-hosted sites.
Now, I don't know if this ease of install will be important for their success or not...
H.
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Yes, that too.
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This isn't that hard to explain.. (Score:5, Interesting)
You need a good mix of introverts and extroverts in an online community. Linkedin has the introverts. Facebook has the Extroverts. Disaspore needs to define who their audience is before they build out the technology. Technology is nothing without the right people.
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They were right in one sense. (Score:5, Insightful)
We are being suckered into an immense data gathering exercise for the sake of a few pages which are "ours".
Perhaps commodification is a better word. I sometimes feel that we have been duped into becoming a product rather than a customer or a user. Worse, this is becoming acceptable for many people.
The thought is disconcerting. After all, what rights do products have? What ramifications does that have for the future? We rely on some misguided sense that these companies or our lawmakers are ethical or reasonable enough to provide safeguards and prevent abuse. That is our only defence, and I have little faith in the competence or ethical integrity of either.
If our personal data is a commodity, as FB and Google and others seem to indicate by their business models, then its only a matter of time before systematic and serious abuses of that data mining become commonplace. Selling fucking personalised ads is the tip of an incredibly large iceberg.
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Agreed, that notion is inherent in the idea of a constitution, and theoretically should be part of a company's incorporation.
It would certainly be nice to have an idea about the values of large companies and clandestine organizations like the FBI, Microsoft, or t
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You fucking moron. Does your underdeveloped brain allow you to understand that in the cases you mention nobody can know about anything your private data?
No one can profile you or target anything while you watch TV, or listen to radio or look at a billboard. Read what is being discussed, try to think, and only then, if you have something of a minimal value to add to the discussion, post it. Otherwise do the world a favor and just shut the fuck up.
Vendor lock-in (Score:5, Insightful)
They're not idiots over there at facebook. They took a cue from Microsoft. They know their survival depends on keeping people's data in facebook, and locked-in there. Things go in to facebook, not out. Your site links to facebook, not the other way around.
You would not need facebook if you were easily able to link up with other social networks, or worse yet your facebook friends were able to seamlessly link with your google+/Dispora/Whatever.
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In hindsight... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Everybody has to learn this stuff eventually.
Yes, and those lessons are best learned with Other People's Money(tm).
Sugar coated... (Score:2)
It was stillborn. Honestly, they never had a chance. The only thing it ever created was a PR buzz. Most everyone that had any technical clue and then learned that the founders had no experience at all knew that it was never going to do anything.
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Ya know, it works. It got off to a rough start but the current software is stable. Whether you call it dead or not, it is still used and functional. It is alive!
Too complex (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently, you must join a 'pod'. What is a pod, what are the differences between Pod A and Pod B, do I have to join the same Pod as my known friends, can I contact people in other Pods?
Dunno.
Input textboxes that don't 'act' like textboxes.
Confusing uptime stats. (Is this Pod good or bad?) Do I care?
If you actually want people, yo must make the initial signup dead easy. If all you want is a developer wankfest, well, I guess you have that. Actual users, not so much.
A sad tale (Score:3, Informative)
Freedows (Score:2)
Remember Freedows, another all hat, no cattle project. Eventually ReactOS was developed in a more modest way and has long since achieved useful status. A good project needs a lot more than good ideas. Essentially all successful open source projects are lead by highly skilled coders.
2 things actually (Score:2)
But under the circumstances of what happened to Zhitomirskiy, I think it's understandable.
Bugs and Security Holes (Score:2)
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yup
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It's open source software. Bugs can be squashed, security holes can be closed. Over time with enough effort the project can mature. If it doesn't there will be forks that use parts of it that are good and grow from there. That's the way the community and projects work.
Or: "It's open source software. Bugs will be left open for years to implement new features nobody wants (Firefox), over time more and more fragmentation will come because of forks and nothing really works. Also, when a project is finished to the original developer (aka "it works"), the whole thing is abandoned.
That is also the way the community works.
Diaspora is pretty good (Score:3)
Diaspora is designed as federated software where many servers can be part of the same network and users and content are shared across those servers in interesting ways. The problem at present is setting it up is very messy and that suppresses interest people have in using it. Therefore I think the best way of increasing its use is to make the setup easy to get it into the hands of as many universities, libraries, schools, businesses and individuals as possible. Make Diaspora a no-brainer to setup - Diaspora in a Box - a script or executable that asks few questions and has a node up and running. If they get to this state then it's likely that some dists might even pick it up or at least support it to some level.
Diaspora was bad code quality from the start (Score:2)
First thing i tried on their demo installation: click login without filling out the form. ... a exception! No wonder, no normal person would like this piece of software.
Result? A nice error message? A white page telling me "wrong login"? No
Another problem is the concept of a distributed social network. This concept have to fail on the promises, because anyone can patch their own node, so it stores everything locally, once its retrieved. Who uses a patched node has advantages over people on normal nodes, but
What happened? (Score:2)
Nothing at all
womp womp
Make It Into A FOSS Project (Score:3)
It probably already is, but forget about the source code that didn't happen and make it into an ongoing FOSS project.
Get some enthusiastic and veteran programmers to take it over. There have to be more than a few uber geeks who don't like Facebook and who want something to replace it.
Some Google programmers may even contribute some of their spare time as it will chip away at their rival.
This Is A Nasty Post, Feel Free Not To Read It (Score:4, Interesting)
I have been programming a long time. I know how much work and how hard it is to make even something decent, but ordinary.
I have to admit that I was offended by the hubris of the original Diaspora group. That some college kids, with no real world programming experience who haven't even completed their educations yet were going to pull something like that off.
To be fair, I am still offended by Mark Zuckerberg's existence, that an ignoramus in his mid 20s who hasn't finished growing up is where he is.
I saw both of these contributing to the bullshit expectations bosses and others have that programmers can just "whip out" something nice, useful, reliable, interesting, etc.
Okay, I ranted my ugly rant.
I wish the kids from Diaspora the best. Their heart was in the right place. They can feel good knowing that they stood up to Zuckerberg, which somewhere along the lines will likely inspire others to do the same. It is also much better to try and fail, then never to try. They will have no regrets, be happier and enjoy victories other people will not for not having given it a shot.
They're nerds (Score:2)
they don't get the girl at all.
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Zuck doesn't get the girl for much longer.. His happy little Kingdom has a serious Introvert shortage.
Re:Ok... (Score:5, Funny)
Probably has a bigger dick, too.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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oh, you're the person, who actually uses the original client?
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100 million wasn't "extreme" at the time?
What we consider "extreme" on facebook right now might be eclipsed by another service in the future.
People are fickle and trendy..despite all the time they've put into facebook, if the right thing comes along at the right time and Facebook does something monumentally foolish, that perfect storm really hasn't happened yet. Google+ really should have been kept in the wings, tested and waiting for Facebook to just completely screw the pooch. Until then it really had no
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that's the point. Myspace and Facebook have been trendy despite good alternatives.
Trendy doesn't mean frequently changing.
They're fickle in that what they want changes constantly. Not the service itself. It might be chalked up to loyalty as much as sheep mentality. Everyone else is here so I'll be here too. One day they say privacy is important but when facebook messes with the privacy settings, suddenly they change their mind.
Re:Beyond Facebook? (Score:5, Interesting)
A serious misstep by the market leader leaves the market open for someone new. Pandas in WoW for example has had millions of WoW players looking for anything that's almost as good, but without pandas. Unfortunately SWTOR was a trainwreck and Guildwars 2 is a very different game (and nothing else has survived long enough to match them).
But I would say Call of Duty, Battlefield and Halo have all managed to find successful space for themselves in the FPS market.
With facebook the problem is getting marginal users to migrate. That friend who isn't tech savvy at all and doesn't know what google plus is or how it's like facebook isn't going to change. But because it's social there's nothing you can do to leave if the people you want to talk to won't leave too. I had someone yesterday try and tell me that the physical keyboard on a blackberry was the key to their stock price rebounding... because some people don't understand technology, at all, getting her off a blackberry is seemingly impossible, just as getting those friends who know nothing about privacy off facebook is impossible. With a social product you're kinda latched to the people who won't leave, even if something else is better.
For facebook their major misstep is going to be privacy. For those of us who are techies it *is* privacy, but facebook is going to end up doing something so catastrophically stupid that all the non tech savvy people are going to panic - or they're going to do subtle things with privacy that regulators are going to catch on to and dry up their revenue stream. Whether or not anyone else is well position to take their user base is hard to say, with myspace I think it was music and allowing you to make your page look like you were on an acid trip, but google plus and diaspora and twitter and everyone else trying to be the next big thing need a polished product to stuff in peoples faces the moment Zuck does something everyone can understand as stupid.
Also, while no one really succeeded in taking down the iPod directly cell phones have wiped out a huge portion the portable music player market by being better and more functional, and are essentially iPod killers. Trying to out iPod the iPod, I agree, not a great plan, nor is trying to out WoW WoW or out Facebook Facebook, that's where I think someone who sees a feature for a product for when facebook really missteps will do well.
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Re:Beyond Facebook? (Score:5, Insightful)
Please don't drive and fiddle with your cellphone.
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Are you certain about that? I've never played WoW in my life (don't want to get addicted, and I'm too easily addicted to gaming as it is) but I did read ArsTechnica's article about the latest expansion (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/10/impressions-mists-of-pandaria-is-more-than-just-pandas/) and the article plus comments suggests to me that this whole issue about pandas is blown out
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I'm aware of them. And they've survived as niche products. In the same way you could still buy a zune for years and can still use myspace or google plus. They exist, and are good enough for their communities, but they aren't serious competition for wow.
EVE never was, eve pre -dates wow and is a completely different product. LOTRO seemed like it had potential for a while, same with rift, but they imploded about the same as SWTOR.
And ya, GW2 being very different can be good. But it's not enough like WoW
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A serious misstep by the market leader leaves the market open for someone new. Pandas in WoW for example has had millions of WoW players looking for anything that's almost as good, but without pandas. Unfortunately SWTOR was a trainwreck and Guildwars 2 is a very different game (and nothing else has survived long enough to match them).
I've only just begun pandaland, but I'm cautiously optimistic that this will be the first expansion in which the protagonist isn't a good guy who went mad.