The Glade 4.0

Word's hit that it's launching September 15th.

While it's nice that someone's taking on Facebook (I was hoping it'd be Google, though their behavior of late with Verizon regarding net neutrality has me rather pissed off at them), the biggest pitfall is, of course, building the community. A social network lives and dies by its usercount. Everyone uses Facebook. Remember when everyone used MySpace? I still have a MySpace account, I think, despite my hatred of them. Why? Because everyone used them. Diaspora is going to have an uphill battle trying to fight the entrenched Facebook users, particularly as Diaspora is, let's face it, more geek-oriented than Facebook. The strength of Facebook is its ubiquity and relative ease of use. It didn't get that way overnight, of course, but more and more and more people have signed up for it. Even completely tech-stupid relatives have a Facebook account. Diaspora is going to have to seriously downplay the tech jargon, and they really need to posit it as a friendly alternative to Facebook. Hire a PR firm and let's see what can happen.

Honestly, the only aspect they need to play up heavily is the privacy. If they can convince people that they're truly respectful of their privacy, and Facebook has had nothing but bad PR lately (also, the film "the social network" is launching Oct 1st, which appears to be a loud dirty airing of the douchebagness of mark zuckerberg), that's basically free PR for them.

Also, they should keep playing up the techie side. Generally, as long as the learning curve is not too steep, geeks break ground, and then bring all their non-geek relatives with them. If their service isn't garbage I'll be pushing all my relatives there as soon as is humanly possible.

I disagree, though I do so sadly. The non-techie masses will sacrifice some privacy problems, security issues, and usability issues for ubiquity. Look at Internet Explorer. Why does everyone use it? Because it's there, no work has to be done to obtain it, and it works with all of their (stupid, noncompliant) work websites. Why does it work with all of their websites? Because everyone uses it, and thus sites are designed for it. Why are sites designed for it? Because everyone uses it. Why does everyone use it? Because sites are oh no I'm stuck in a loop of bad logic.

A tech focus is going to do nothing but confuse and infuriate people who don't have a preexisting interest in this stuff. To unseat Facebook (which is their stated goal), you have to play to the non-tech crowd, the people who want to do nothing more than annoy the piss out of their friends who don't want to hear about the new cow they had sex with in Farmville or whatever, and the perception of a confusing, tech-oriented (as opposed to user-oriented) option is going to be met with the cold shoulder.

Also, the fact that Diaspora has a Facebook link on their site makes me giggle.

I think we're talking about the same thing, but I was speaking more front-loaded. They're not even launching a customer facing alpha site until October. It seems like they need to get the word out to the tech community first, get the bugs worked out, then go for the Facebook tech moron gusto.

If they launch it to the tech morons unpolished, the first time someone loses a picture or gets an error or two, it's back to Facebook they go. "Sure, facebook sucks, but I never got errors like THAT".