Notes on Diaspora Talk

Posted on by Luis Villa

Diaspora came to lunch at Mozilla today. Some notes.

  • They gave me a nice shoutout. ;)
  • They’re doing pair-programming and test-driven development this summer, which I think is great. Sounds like they’re getting some great guidance from Pivotal Labs.
  • Very explicitly trying to focus on things everyone can use, rather than something for geeks.
  • Are trying to do micro-networks, rather than ‘everyone on the same plane’; I’m curious to see where that goes.
  • They’ll have single-user ‘seeds’ or multi-user ‘pods’ for servers. Push-driven, like email.
  • They’re doing Rails and Mongo, and even Websockets; they’re having problems between Websockets and Rails.
  • Planning on doing a code release by ‘flipping the github bit’ on September 15th, but will continue hacking after that, since they have a ‘low burn rate.’
  • Seem a bit worried about the community management problem once they go live.
  • Have a slide describing feature set for beta; focus on easy group management for you and close friends; private broadcasting to those friends; full data exportability.
  • Longer term: work with ostatus/other stuff to work closely with other distributed technologies; plugin and application infrastructure; build community and focus on design.
  • Anonymity is not currently a design goal, but still thinking about basic crypto and heavy focus on privacy (including privacy expectations-setting.)
  • In the move to california, they appear to have abandoned arepas for tacos. Bad news.
  • I admit I’m troubled that there is lots of talk about technology, and not much talk about UI/HCI/design, but in response to my question they say they mostly didn’t talk about it because it is still very much in flux. They’re talking with others about the problem, which is good to hear.

Anyway, interesting stuff- I continue to wish them well.

Published by Luis Villa

23 thoughts on “Notes on Diaspora Talk”

  3. Was it recorded? If so why does Mozilla keep the good things for themselves?

    But thanks for sharing.

  7. rails, websockets, pair programming, TDD, github, sounds like they have checked all the hipster boxes.

    Still, best of luck.

  9. Hmm, my browsers only show two comments although WordPress says there are 8 comments.

    Any news about the recording?

  10. No idea on the recording; we don’t have a very good process for getting recordings onto the web- sort of sad, really. :/

    The comments are because my theme is busted and doesn’t show trackbacks; that’s all those other comments are. Frankly, I’m tempted to just turn off trackbacks rather than fix the theme.

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  16. I’m rather disappointed that they’re going the “micro-networking” route rather than trying to be a Facebook replacement… Facebook’s rather versatile, whereas Twitter is retarded (unless you can read hiragana, Cherokee, Big5 Chinese, or another language that uses a syllabary and not an alphabet for it’s written form). Given that, of the five languages I have any knowledge of (English, français, 日本語, epsañol and ᏣᎳᎩ), only two use a syllabary, micro-networking is Mostly Useless™. I hope that Diaspora isn’t serious about pursuing that route.

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