No disrespect to Diaspora, but they hadn't really come up with anything new, especially nothing that a company like Google would have to look towards them for inspiration. Livejournal had friends lists for a decade, plenty of other projects were looking to federate social networking (Appleseed, OneSocialWeb, FOAF, etc). I think this is giving way too much credit to Diaspora, whose real innovation it seems was in the marketing/crowdsourced funding space.