You can bet for most non-US people that 'diaspora' reminds them of some sort of persecution their people have faced. It is also a word that is used in a lot of languages, I have friends who are Russian, Ukranian, Serbian, Lebanese, Armenian, Jordanian etc. who all refer to themselves being in the 'diaspora' (ie. persecuted people who left their homeland and are now living in the west)
I like it for that reason. Edgy, accurate, and with the potential to repurpose/reframe the word in the minds of many.
That kind of persecution also tends to cause the persecuted to bond even more strongly and proudly with their cultural identity, so the connotations are not all bad.
* I say this because every time I've tried to describe it verbally, I always end up saying something like 'disapora' and making a hand-wavey gesture in a direction "away" from 'facebook'
Funny, I think of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora
Your mileage, of course, may vary.
Diaspora is at least an easy-grade SAT word.
Even for those of us who know the denotation, it gives absolutely no indicator as to what the product does. (It is instead a reference to how the product works... dispersed Facebook). From a marketing standpoint this is a problem.
Hopefully this will become 'the diaspora project', and they will come up with a new name for the actual results of it.
For New York Jews? You say it to me I think potato famines.
It's a fine, catchy name with some bite. Hopefully they don't trade it in for something dumb like folksr.
(I know this is like planning where to put the swimming pool in your 1 bedroom apartment in the event that you win the lottery but I think the choice of name does/did have a lot to do with just how long the view of the founders was when they started.)
That said, it is currently my only quibble. I'm glad to see that things actually got done and out the door. It sure seems to have gone a lot better than anything I worked on this summer.
The whole idea is to allow the Facebook-bound multitudes to leave that particular kingdom and spread -- along with their data -- across the Internet, as a decentralized system.
The name is therefore the goal, the intended result. It's a high bar, but it's an ambitious project.