Yes but remember how important the "seed users" are, which is why Facebook started where it did. If they truly deliver on the non-corporate, privacy aspects and keep a slim interface then many "alpha geeks" will swap over. Do you really care about the 100 or 200 friends you have on Facebook or the core 10-40? Or if all your tech buddies and most of your clued-in friends are on Diaspora and posting content there they don't post on Facebook, which account will you log into first? What will your Facebook become then other than a viewer, rather than a place that you put content? Would you have much trouble shutting down your Facebook at that point?
I don't see any unfunded startup being able to do anything new in this space, Facebook offered interface over Myspace. Diaspora offers control over Facebook - and from this demo they seem to be dispelling the vapour accusations, although we will have to see how it progresses. Google and Twitter currently are offering things and will be offering more in this space also. What real other avenues or general areas do you see a newcomer playing to? Games? Dating? Work collaboration? An even better interface? I don't see many areas for traction. Yes there is probably something I haven't thought of, but I don't think you can place your "bet" on a hypothetical vs these guys with an interesting demo and plenty of money to keep developing, who have hype and who are attacking the most vulnerable privacy/information vector in this market without some reasoning to back it up.
Edit/addendum:
I also think these guys rubbed a lot of HN people the wrong way - although I am not accusing you of this necessarily - because they got decent crowd-sourced funding in a seemingly haphazard way. Yes they are young, but if you go back to their pitch it was very slick, and as I said above, this tech demo goes a fair way to dispel the concerns about their youth/inexperience.
You sound like the slow-adopters of facebook. In the world we live in with security becoming more of a general concern, they could be on the front-edge of the revolution they think they are on. Plus, if they deliver on the UX/UI, people will use it.
"In the world we live in with security becoming more of a general concern"
Which world is that? The one where people post minute details of their life on twitter? The one where they send naked pics of themselves around, expose themselves on chatroulette?
It's going the other way - people are exposing more and more of themselves making more of their life public than ever before.
Some geeks are always concerned about privacy/security. How many "normal people" use PGP to sign their emails?
Today's concerns for security are not concerns for keeping our information private. Rather, they are concerns that we will maintain control over our private information, to be able to share it at our own discretion. Facebook removes much of this control from the user.
The name can be changed, what I want is the technology.
Show me the code and let me develop on it. Let me change the interface, add features, and do analysis on my social graph. Depending on the license they release the code under, there could potentially be other services that use the technology and have a nicer name than Diaspora.
Facebook users might even take notice if Diaspora has a "dislike" button and access to their Facebook data via Diaspora.
The issue is, you'll get complete fragmentation and confusion. It won't get widespread adoption.
It's a fun thing for geeks to play with, but I don't think there is any way in hell this can succeed with the current setup.
It'll be fragmentation, yes, but hopefully it will be smart fragmentation, not chaos. The purpose of a distributed social network is for there not to be a single centralized server. They're not building a Facebook clone, they're building an open social network.
The way people use social networks right now is fragmented. People have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. and they have to continually check those. What Diaspora potentially offers is a way to unify that communication, if you so choose.
Diaspora doesn't necessarily have to move people over from Facebook to their service completely. People may not need to leave any service at all. All Diaspora needs to do, is provide the same access to their social network, but with a little bit more control and extensibility.
There are currently 3,208,579 people on Facebook who want a dislike button. If Diaspora can provide that in the form of a dislike plugin, there's a lot of potential users. If Diaspora does not force any changes to their interface, but instead allows users to theme and customize them, then there are a few million more potential users.
As far as how long it will take before Diaspora has all of the features that Facebook has, I personally believe that it will take less time. The technology is more established than it was when Facebook first started, and they were still trying to figure out what would work, what wouldn't, and how they can make money.
In Diaspora's instance however, there are quite a few case studies (Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare) that they can look towards for inspiration. People are in general a bit more open, and engaged on social networks than they were when Facebook was founded (Facebook after all was first limited to college students only). Plus, there are the untold number of developers who would be willing to contribute towards the project when it is finally open sourced (just look at how many backers they got, and that was money, not code).
Phew, this comment turned into more of an essay, but I think it sums up my views, and hopes on Diaspora. Agree or disagree, thanks for reading at least :)
It doesn't have to get widespread adoption. It just has to be suitable for me to use. I don't use facebook hardly at all for posting content. I almost never log into it.
If this can pull from facebook eventually and perhaps even push to it then I'll be happy.
It's open source and open protocols. Because of that it's definition of success is not the same as a startups. Even if the project fails miserably but in the process causes Facebook to change a little then that will be a success IMO.
That's slightly different. Other search engines were poor. They focused on the wrong things, and didn't actually give good search results in the way users wanted.
Facebook actually solves most peoples needs very well for a social network / casual gaming platform.
Any competitor will have to work for a few years just to get the features that people will assume it has. Then comes the massive job of moving people from facebook.
Consider ebay. Ebay actually really sucks. It's terrible. Yet everyone still uses it for auctions. Why aren't there any auction startups? Because it's impossible to get people to move.
I don't see any unfunded startup being able to do anything new in this space, Facebook offered interface over Myspace. Diaspora offers control over Facebook - and from this demo they seem to be dispelling the vapour accusations, although we will have to see how it progresses. Google and Twitter currently are offering things and will be offering more in this space also. What real other avenues or general areas do you see a newcomer playing to? Games? Dating? Work collaboration? An even better interface? I don't see many areas for traction. Yes there is probably something I haven't thought of, but I don't think you can place your "bet" on a hypothetical vs these guys with an interesting demo and plenty of money to keep developing, who have hype and who are attacking the most vulnerable privacy/information vector in this market without some reasoning to back it up.
Edit/addendum: I also think these guys rubbed a lot of HN people the wrong way - although I am not accusing you of this necessarily - because they got decent crowd-sourced funding in a seemingly haphazard way. Yes they are young, but if you go back to their pitch it was very slick, and as I said above, this tech demo goes a fair way to dispel the concerns about their youth/inexperience.