Agreed. The UI isn't even that good. They paid a company to tell them to copy Facebook, but ghettoed it. The funding definitely went to people who were not ready for this. They had 4 developers on this, you'd expect more polish. Just feels like a regular crud app with flash sockets, won't work iPhone/iPad without a lot of tinkering. Am I being too harsh?
I agree with your criticism from a quick look.
That being said, I have no skills to bother taking a look under the hood. Could be they've done some impressive stuff underneath, and it will manifest over time?
If you aren't familiar with "The Mythical Man Month", you should probably acquaint yourself with it.
Re:Diaspora Developer Release
by Vishnevskiy on Wednesday September 15, 2010 @09:58PM
(#1696582)
In my perspective I was leaning more toward having funding for a designer (I assume they paid 10k for http://luxr.posterous.com/ or got it free). I am not a designer, but since we have not hired one, I am the one doing the designing and ending up spending more time then I should and hating what I come up with. I am also the main engineer on our project so thats time I could be putting to making code/features better.
Money and more help can solve some problems.
Re:Diaspora Developer Release
by pdelgallego on Thursday September 16, 2010 @09:02AM
(#1697658)
Why you didn't take a third partner?
I think a designer=that-can-code or a developer-that-can-design make things happen faster.
Re:Diaspora Developer Release
by Vishnevskiy on Thursday September 16, 2010 @11:35AM
(#1698110)
I would love to have a third partner. But finding a designers/developers who love MMOs and live in Los Angeles proved to be kind of hard.
I have personally been working with my co-founder with zero funding on a MMORPG social start-up that brings the best features of Facebook to another group of people. We have implemented real-time features through Erlang (including Chat and Streams), data collection/aggregation from games, and far more. (http://www.guildwork.com/blog/ if anyone is interested, its our public testing site, we have not launched). Anyway I guess my point was if 2 people with zero funding and no office can accomplish that, I certainly expected more from them. But to be fair we been killing ourselves slowly by working as hard as we do, maybe they took a relaxing approach. =P
Also for something that is meant to be distributed Rails does not seem like a very good choice.
Just my 2 cents, hopefully open sourcing it will pick things up.