So when they "open to public": 1. who's going to notice? 2. with the current user-friendliness, who's going to care?

But in any case, they give out invites like water, you just have to email [email protected]. Since that's the beta testing site, they're looking for beta testers, not casual users.

Diaspora does have publicity on it's side, I'll give it that. We'll see how user-friendly it's first release is in September.

(yeah - I know that's not as true nowadays as it was at the beginning of y2k, but I'm trying to make a point here...)

I've always thought the distributed social site concept had room for both those people who want to run things themselves and for service providers. Kind of like wordpress.

It's possible that in a couple of months Diaspora will look a lot less like a Great White Hope. We will see.

That said, I'll only use Diaspora for myself, but that's based on personal preference.

I know Ruby like the back of my hand and am comfortable with Rails. Also, my site's built in Rails, so Diaspora will probably integrate nicely.

In other words, it's software for anyone who wants to run their own facebook-like site. Except that all the sites running it connect to each other.

Once it's out of beta, most users will just go to a sign up page of any number of nodes out there (I think there's like 50 out there already? I'm not sure)

Typical facebook users are not early adopters. None of these projects are even close to targeting typical facebook users yet.

I really can't say that Diaspora has been doing that better. Or at all.

The real problems with all this stuff is conceptualizing exactly how distributed social networking system should work is actually a really hard problem. I would like to see a description of what the best solution is. That is more important than some set of code that supposedly solves the problem according to someone's concept, which they don't or can't explain.

I mean, for Diaspora or Appleseed or any similar effort to work, they have to have a network effect. And this involves, besides having it work, telling people why they should use it, why they should run servers with it, and why it will work.

Except possibly OneSocialWeb, which extends XMPP. Is that the project you find most intriguing?

I've seen BASIC used to power million dollar companies.

To throw out some project simply because it is built in a language you don't like is counter-productive. I know PHP is the language to hate around here but you could do a lot worse in a web environment.

PHP really is the new 'BASIC', it has a very low barrier to get started and that's why plenty of people associate it with crummy code but you don't have to write crummy code in any language.

http://svn.appleseedproject.org/trunk/_documentation/quickso...

From the source, it looks like they're building abstracted PHP libraries, too. And it's an event/hook architecture, so you can pop this protocol out and put another one in, theoretically.

I don't know if this is a placeholder protocol while they build the software, or if this is what they plan on using and evolving.

Look at the list of apps that simplescripts supports[1], most of them are PHP (and simplescript in-turn is supported by a lot of hosts).

Look at OpenSourceCRM - most of the applications there are PHP[2]. The most popular open source CRM applications are also written in PHP[3]

PHP makes up a significant portion of self-install web apps because it is so widely supported[4] (LAMP), it easy to setup and a lot of sysadmins and designers understand how the apps work.

I commented when Diaspora was announced that for these reasons, and because of the target market, PHP would have been a better choice. They could have slipstreamed the install on top of the already large install base of these other applications without admins and potential users having to purchase or setup additional servers (ie. if you already have Wordpress installed somewhere, installing a PHP Diaspora would be a cinch. It could even read and setup using WP or other config files).

You may not like PHP (I don't know anybody who likes it from a design perspective), but you would be a fool to ignore it.

[1] http://www.simplescripts.com/script_list

[2] http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/search.php

[3] http://www.insidecrm.com/features/top-open-source-solutions-...

[4] http://php.net/usage.php

Not only is it in a language that many hackers dislike, but it's a supposedly decentralized social app in a centralized (and, in this context, archaic) SVN repo.

Today, DVCS is essentially the foundation of developer social networks, both formally (github, bitbucket) and informally. How are you going to make a supposedly decentralized open source social network when the foundation isn't decentralized? Mom doesn't care right now whether a social network is decentralized and open source, developers do.

What risk do you perceive?

At the end of the day, the hip new app with the latest fashionable framework might still send your plaintext password over HTTP.

I'm sure you'll see a lot of different protocol support in the future.