BitShareA first look at Diaspora, the future of social networking
Diaspora means the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland. Case in point, Facebook. For the past few years for social networking, the established home for social interaction has been with Facebook.
Myspace tried to keep up with Facebook but failed. Twitter once thought of a social network is becoming more of a content aggregation source. Some claim Tumblr to be a social network; I say it’s social blogging. Go back over a year ago. Another website came around trying to be something that Facebook has always had issues with and that is privacy and who owns user’s information. In Facebook’s case, they own users information. This of course doesn’t sit well with many but is the reality of today’s social networking sites.
In April of 2010, four kids from NYU decided to create Diaspora, a different way of social networking. For the past year and a half they have been working hard on their social platform. The main appeal for Diaspora is two-fold: the user owns all their information and has full control over their privacy. The other is something they are calling “Pods”. Pods are a way for the user to use Diaspora’s open source code and run their own social network on their own server [or rent one from Diaspora] with all their information on it, owned by the user including their friends on that network. All while being connected to the main Diaspora network and others, if you wish. You can even sync the two together. Think of being able to run WordPress on your own site, it’s similar methodology. There is talk about feeding all your content from Twitter and Facebook to your Pod, having all your social interactions in one place, owned and controlled by you.
With that said, I got invited to the alpha version of Diaspora. Hats off to Gabe who always gets the good invites to new websites and gets me in. You should definitely follow him and also check out this blog TechAture.
After checking out Diaspora, it looks very promising. I now I understand why for the past year those that have gotten to see it before it launched more widely think it can compete with Facebook. There is really just one major problem I see so far. It’s called Google Plus!
Everything I am seeing on Diaspora is on Google Plus. Diaspora has friend circles similar to Google Plus called “Aspects”. The look and feel are almost identical. One would think there is some immitation across platforms here. Who had what first? Diaspora came on the scene back in April 2010. Google Plus just launched in beta in June 2011. So clearly Diaspora was around first, right? Well my understanding is that Google Plus employees were using Google Plus for one year before going to beta, so that would put it back in June 2010 where they probably had built it for some time before that to get it to an alpha version for Google employees to test.
The point is, both platforms have been building and developing for the past year. Diaspora has been widely written about in the tech world as a Facebook alternative, Google Plus kind of sprung out of nowhere in June. So it’s quite possible Google Plus has been getting some pointers from Diaspora. Diaspora even called Google out on their most recent blog post saying they influenced Google Circles. I would say their argument holds a lot of weight, but nobody really knows. Also, does it matter? I think for Google Plus it doesn’t but for Diaspora, this can destroy everything they worked hard for in the last year and half.
Google has the reach, funds and resources that Diaspora doesn’t. If someone can come out on top, and when I say on top I mean able to compete with Facebook and even get users to switch platforms it will be Google. Diaspora simply doesn’t have the funding and resources that Google has.
Diaspora still has the ace in the hole which is their Pods functionality. It could just be that Diaspora is ahead of it’s time. Maybe the average user isn’t ready to run their own social network on their own server. Maybe the average user doesn’t have the time or energy. But for me, that is the appeal and could be the future of social networking where the network is in your hands, not somebody else’s.
