In the Telegraph:
Diaspora, the 'anti-Facebook', is doomed
It's too late to start a Facebook rival, argues Milo Yiannopoulos
They say that Facebook is too big to be brought down by open source privacy-aware networks. But a personally owned server instance of Diaspora* doesn't have to beat Facebook to get people to use it.
The Diaspora project is a response to privacy concerns with Facebook. Its strategy is to put users' posted content under their control. While sympathetic to people worried about the privacy of content they post on the Internet for their friends, I've always thought that informed users' use of the site will adapt to the privacy choices available. If you're nervous about how much control you have over the content you post on Facebook, you will tend not to post content that you don't want some people to see. There is definitely a great deal of value in being able to use the Internet to talk privately amongst close friends, so when people are concerned about being able to do that on Facebook, they take it back to email, instant messaging, or some other forum where they feel more comfortable. Diaspora comes out of an attempt to create such a more secure option than Facebook. But will anybody use it?
I rent hosting space for a price of a few venti lattes a month. I run programs there that are some of the core of my web presence. I also have a Facebook profile, Twitter account, delicious, etc. But most of my friends just have a Facebook profile. I post different content in each channel (or context of the relationships I have with the people ). When Diaspora comes out, I can host my own instance of the social network here. Diaspora's critics think it will be a lonely little network indeed.
Diaspora is not going to be able to displace a significant part of the Facebook market. I bet few people who decide to use Diaspora will even access their Facebook network less. There's no way many users will redirect all their social activity to not be broadcasting and receiving from where 90% of their Friends remain. Therefore, skeptics claim Diaspora can't get a foothold.
That's assuming, though, that people would use Diaspora to specifically not connect with Facebook. Every other major social site and tons of tiny ones connect with Facebook using the Facebook Connect API, why wouldn't Diaspora? It's easy to implement: For example, I could let you comment with a logged in Facebook Profile on my
blog just by getting an API key and adding a Wordpress extension. Diaspora will surely have extensions. You can comment here on my Posterous by connecting to your Facebook account. Users can control the sites they connect to with their privacy and applications settings (though some would say they aren't as easy to use as they should be, though the critics tend to be more aware and better able to use the settings, so this fact may mean little for adoption.) My friends may or may not use Facebook Connect to provide their identity to me if they want to comment on my stuff. An email address is good enough to grab your Gravatar, if you have one. That's not a confirmed logged in identity, but good enough for most blog comments.
Now, what does this have to do with Diaspora? I doubt people would use Diaspora to hide from Facebook altogether, but I can imagine a sector of this privacy-concerned market who would use it in concert with Facebook. Connecting the two together would allow somebody the ability to link your friends up to content in Diaspora where your application can be configured to present it exactly as you want. Very few would be willing to abandon the chance to read and participate in the conversations their friends are having in the Facebook context even if they wanted to have other conversations more privately in some way elsewhere. Back at your own Diaspora instance, a Facebook Connect login from one of your friends there will grant them access to your hosted resources, per your privacy settings for that user (or group) so you can have the type of conversations privacy advocates are concerned about hosting on Facebook. Some of your Diaspora activity (the part you want to share with some or all Facebook friends but you want hosted under your own control) should be pushed to your Facebook wall and their news feeds as a link back to Diaspora. When they follow the link and confirm their identity, they see the content. I already have a couple friends who use alternate social networks to post content into Facebook. In my feed, I sometimes see links to photos and events posted on
Strands, perhaps with a thumbnail just like a Facebook photo. If you had a friend you cared about who published photos on his own Disapora server and linked from Facebook, wouldn't you authenticate so you could view and comment on them when you wanted? If you did, you would only post content there that you were content to have managed within that context. While you probably wouldn't post your phone number in a public comment on my blog, you may leave it for me to look at behind the login of my own Diaspora instance.
Diaspora will be a personal portal that will be able to import content from connected networks and cloud services (Like my Facebook and Twitter posts, Netflix ratings, Delicious bookmarks, Blog posts, etc). It could also be a personal publishing platform, sending information out over various APIs. I think of it as the beginnings of an agent in the cloud. Its power depends on the contexts it's linked to as well as the information hosted directly. Like a movie star has an agent to deal with the outside world, it can't do much without a big Rolodex. I already use cloud services to handle my mail (Gmail), calls (Gvoice), social/learning network reading (FB, Twitter, Google Reader, LinkedIn et. al.), and publishing (Wordpress, Posterous, Facebook, Twitter, Ping.fm), and identity (OpenID, Gravatar). In the combination of Diaspora with all these cloud services, I am even reminded of Jane from
Ender's Game, though an agent in the sky whose processor cycles and storage are distributed across millions of nodes is another whole level above a self-hosted cloud version of Diaspora.
Diaspora will be more powerful when it connects to the social networks you already have in place, but's likely that the initial Diaspora/Facebook integration will not be as smooth or powerful as I describe. For example, to my knowledge, Facebook hasn't let applications, even its own Android client, access to the granular privacy settings for each story to be published. From a Facebook Connected Diaspora, I won't be able to select that certain friend groups on Facebook should see photos and others just status updates and links let alone select each time I wanted to post something. Whatever I publish from Android goes up under the default settings. However, there's no reason they can't work together better. The environment into which you're posting content is the context on which you place it socially as well as technically, so if you can only post content at default privacy settings from Diaspora, only content suitable for that context will be posted.
Diaspora will not be successful by siphoning users from Facebook to build completely separate social networks. Its function as a user agent that integrates with somebody's existing social networks wherever they may be will be Diaspora's killer app, more important than its original privacy intent. I know I don't have a big enough of a personal following to draw any of my friends not interested in Diaspora themselves to my own social network instance. I'll depend on being able to take my content to where they are. Anyway, as we can see from
Failbook, true privacy depends on your friends not taking a screenshot of your most embarrassing online moments as much as the privacy regime they are posted under.
There is a danger that people are going to put animated sparkles all over their profile and auto-start some really crappy music. If that's the context for presenting themselves that they want to build, they can, but only the people who want to see that will post there.
