Last week, Diaspora told us that they’d be giving a series of talks at Pivotal Labs (who are lending them hacking space for the summer), Mozilla HQ, and Razorfish. Of these talks, only one is available on video: Pivotal Labs presentation, August 18. The Mozilla talk was broadcast but not archived; it may be available on Air Mozilla later.

It looks like the team is now confident enough in their codebase that they’re handing out alpha invites to Pivotal Labs employees, and making the server available on the public Internet. The above screenshot is all us normals can see at the moment. Watch the video through and learn the URL for yourself! Judging by my brief skim of the talk, they’ve also implemented groups and photos now, although neither is stable.

There was a minimal amount of blog coverage of these events, mostly Mozilla hackers. One of the reports at Mozilla comes from Luis Villa, whom the Diaspora team responded to back in April. Villa feels “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.” However, his outlook on Diaspora seems mostly optimistic: “Very explicitly trying to focus on things everyone can use, rather than something for geeks.”

The other blog report comes from Michael Kurze, who offers a much more detailed analysis of flaws in the Diaspora model. I think this paragraph especially is worth quoting:

Secure HTTP is great when a large, anonymous group of people needs to trust a central service. It allows us to do online banking and purchases, free from eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks. However, it is not peer-to-peer: When you fetch your mail over a secure IMAP connection, you might be sure that your password is protected, but you do not know who actually sent you that e-mail (think about it: that is the reason why phishing works). When you get it from Google Mail, you might be using TLS, but Google is still able to read your every conversation.

Unfortunately I don’t have time to watch the Pivotal Labs video all the way through right now, but I’d be interested to hear what experienced hackers and my fellow end users think about their presentation. How are they doing two months in? Do you think they’ll be able to meet their self-imposed September 15th deadline?

Some people have expressed interest in running a Diaspora server from home. It seems a little expensive to buy a server just for a node/blog, but there are other benefits to running a server from your house: easy access to your documents and multimedia whereever you go, using a free service like Tonido. (Maybe someone will write a Tonido plugin for Diaspora!) So, I was doing a little research on this yesterday.

You can have in your home today a plug computer that works with your Ethernet or WiFi. Once you buy it, it uses minimal energy: an 80 to 90 percent savings over buying a full-power computer. But it does everything a computer does, and can be used for an endless variety of useful tasks, from hosting your website to backing up your documents.

They are available to buy, from Globalscale or IonicsPlug, for $99, which is a lot cheaper than buying a small server. Unfortunately, the built-in software is a little lacking, according to reviews; you’ll have to be willing to get your hands dirty. Also, one thing to note about these current models is they only have a 500MB flash drive. Apparently there are newer models coming out later this year which will have a real hard drive, so keep an eye on it.

Real reviews of this device are hard to find, but here’s a positive one from LinuxFormat magazine (PDF). Also check out the plug forum which has a lot more information on these micro-servers.

The official Diaspora blog has a big update with screenshots and video. They say they’ve implemented everything seen in the video except for the profile pictures, which is great, because it shows some complicated behavior (chat and status) using decentralized nodes.

You can also see that the user interface looks much less like a blog, as it did in the mock-up screenshot, and more like Facebook.

March 2010 pre-pre-alpha screenshot

July 2010 pre-alpha screenshot

Already, Diaspora’s offering is looking better from a UI standpoint than anything currently available from free software developers. I think it’s safe to say at this point that the grassroots investments were not wasted. However, the whole thing depends on people moving their friends to Diaspora when it comes out; and that’s not going to happen until September! I hope y’all can hold out until then.

This week’s news

The Diaspora team have moved into offices in SF and started programming.

Ars Technica asks: Is a cloud computing disaster in the making?

Two Facebook replacements that solve the wrong problem

I took a look at two Facebook-like social sites that have been heavily advertised but didn’t appear on my list of active replacements: Pip.io and Millatfacebook.

Pip.io is, to some extent, well designed (it acts kind of like the popular IM client Meebo), and the developers are friendly and respond to questions. However, I couldn’t help but feel when I tried it out that it was a solution in search of a problem. It doesn’t resolve the principal Facebook issues of privacy, security, and user freedom. It’s really just another proprietary network with no interest in the rights of its users, and it doesn’t have the useful features of Facebook.

Millatfacebook has a different, more interesting purpose. It was founded to challenge material on Facebook that was offensive to Pakistanis, and when I checked a week ago it had over 5,000 users online, nearly all of them Pakistanis writing in English. They claim to have reached 300,000 members in just two weeks. It certainly seems to have touched a nerve among people who feel like Facebook’s values don’t square with their own. The site as it stood was a fairly standard Facebook clone, albeit a little lacking in capabilities. But as of today they’ve replaced their site with a waving Islamic flag and a long, meandering message about the Zionist Facebook establishment:

This is very strange that Mark’s Facebook which allow and supports RIDICULE of Holy Prophet (SAWW) is not objectionable but Millatfacebook.com which prohibits the ridicule of any faith and offers a very decent environment is” Objectionable” ………….

“Objectionable” …………. Because www.millatfacebook.com is by Muslims and is uniting them on one platform????????

But Alhamdurlillah they have been constantly DEFEATED successfully. All this has been phenomenal and miraculous. It is no ordinary feat and cannot be explained just by any traditional logics.

All this is Allah’s blessings and YOUR support. So our heartily and deepest gratitude and CONGRATS goes to YOU.

AND NOW THE ENEMY HAS GONE DESPARATE

Mark’s FB has gone to further lows by putting pressure on our service provider

I personally doubt that Facebook itself pressured someone to take down Millatfacebook. Probably the site’s overwhelming success has exceeded its host’s bandwidth capacity. This demonstrates the flaw with starting just another centralized site, even if it supports your values better than Facebook. No one single site can answer the needs of all users. To really solve this problem, we need to have a distributed network.

Diaspora’s Kickstarter fundraiser ended about an hour and a half ago. $200,647 was raised from 6,480 backers. The burst of donations on the last day attest to a money bomb from dedicated Diaspora supporters to put them past the $200,000 mark. Hopefully this staggering number will make some more headlines!

As the fundraiser wound down, the Diaspora team updated their website to get their message out. They added a “Frequently Asked Questions” section which covers most of the ground this blog has addressed so far. In a final fundraising update, they discussed the unexpectedly large number of CDs and T-shirts the fundraiser would have them send out, and asked their supporters not to request a CD or T-shirt unless they wanted one.

I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg requested a T-shirt? In the interview with Wired magazine in which he came out as a Diaspora backer, he compared Diaspora to his pet project Wirehog which was nixed by Facebook executives, adding, “If someone can come up with a new approach [to social networking], then [that's] awesome.”

On today, May 31, 2010, over 25,000 people have pledged to quit Facebook. But where will they go to? What are your options for social interaction online? Here’s a table of all your options, including brand new inventions. It’s up to you to choose the best way to connect with your friends and community.

How to Beat Facebook Today: Twitter, Blogger, and E-mail

As you can see from the chart, the number one medium to replace Facebook with is plain old e-mail. There are probably a lot of occasions where you used Facebook instead of e-mail because it seemed more convenient. But e-mail is guaranteed to respect privacy and security, where Facebook won’t. And you can upload as many photos and videos as you want!

For stuff like signing into websites or posting quick updates, I recommend that you get a Twitter account. Twitter isn’t perfect, but they’ve shown themselves to be less evil than Facebook. Plus, they’re super-popular around the world. I bet some of your friends have Twitter already. Support Twitter as a competitor to Facebook and everyone wins in the long run. Shaq is on Twitter; why aren’t you?

For long, public updates, you can get a blog and link to it on Twitter, which is what I’m going to do when I finish this post! Of course, blogs aren’t very private, but they’re easy to use and ubiquitous. And of course, don’t forget to take IM back from Facebook Chat; encourage your friends to use AIM, MSN, or Gmail Chat.

A little word about the other uses of Facebook. The number one thing people do on Facebook is play Farmville. But nobody actually enjoys playing Farmville; it’s at its core a sociopathic trick, the goal of which is to con you into sending money to Zynga. So, I didn’t include any “social gaming websites” on this chart. Just go enjoy a nice game somewhere outside Facebook.

How To Beat Facebook Tomorrow

Now that the initial worries have died down, and Facebook has issued new, retroactive privacy tools, it’s not clear how many people the Quit Facebook Day campaign will affect. Personally, I’m not quitting until this August at the earliest; some of my Internet friends have already left, but virtually everyone at my college is still linked in. If we want to get rid of Facebook for good, we need a replacement that will do everything it does, way better.

Right now, if you want to switch to a website like that, you’re looking towards the bottom of the chart, and these are projects that aren’t ready for prime time yet. You can see the N-1 website there, and it looks kind of OK, but I challenge you to figure out how to register and write a blog post! Other options are even more difficult: you’ll have to buy web hosting and set them up, or even edit computer code to get off the ground. If you want a Facebook alternative that your friends will use, you’ll have to wait it out for something like Diaspora. If you’re interested in that, subscribe to this blog and I’ll keep you updated.

Note: I neglected to mention on this blog that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated to Diaspora. That’s a rare show of geek-to-geek fraternity on his part!

On the eve of Quit Facebook Day, the GNU Social project emerged from a long, intense brainstorming stage. The six members of the development team who have begun programming announced on the discussion list that they were going to base their software after the popular Twitter clone StatusNet. Actually, they had already been modifying the StatusNet code for some time, but the people who had been discussing possible alternatives on their mailing list weren’t aware of this. This led to some brief confusion over how GNU Social was planning to proceed.

The end product will apparently be a different piece of software from StatusNet, but it will use the underlying collection of protocols called OStatus. I’ll make a little Venn diagram to show the current state of Facebook competitors:

Please forgive my MSPaint skills. Anyway, as you can see, federated social networks are kind of a mess at this point in time. There are a lot of projects scattered all over the place. There’s no single way to federate because everyone has a different idea of what a social network should be. By joining the OStatus circle, GNU Social is actually lending a little weight to an existing and thriving network, StatusNet. However, StatusNet is closer to Twitter than Facebook. Will it even be useful to have interoperability between the two?

The Diaspora team snuck in a technical post on their About page that I didn’t catch at first. I bet a lot of other people missed it, too. Here it is, with some notes:

Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy. We call these computers ‘seeds’. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server.

The ideal situation is for you to run software on your own computer. However, not everyone can do that, so there will be some services like Blogspot or WordPress, except for social networking.

Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your facebook profile, tweets, anything. We are designing an easily extendable plugin framework for Diaspora, so that whenever newfangled content gets invented, it will be automagically integrated into every seed.

Now that you have your information in your seed, it will connect to every service you used to have for you. For example, your seed will keep pulling tweets and you will still be able to see your Facebook newsfeed. In fact, Diaspora will make those services better! Upload an image to Flickr and your seed can automatically generate a tweet from the caption and link. Social networking will just get better when you have control over your data.

A seed will not just be all your existing networks put together, though. Decentralizing lets us reconstruct our “social graphs” so that they belong to us. Our real social lives do not have central managers, and our virtual lives do not need them.

In other words, you don’t need Facebook, Yahoo, or Google to handle your private information; it should be on your own computer where you can keep track of it.

Friend another seed and the two of you can synchronize over a direct and secure connection instead of through a superfluous hub. Encryption (privacy nerds: we’re using GPG) will ensure that no matter what kind of content is being transferred, you can share privately. Eventually, today’s hubs could be almost entirely replaced by a decentralized network of truly personal websites.

I think this pretty much speaks for itself!

On May 31st, over 14,000 principled individuals will mass delete their Facebook accounts, for Quit Facebook Day. But I won’t be among them. Why not?

1. I need to get the message out to my friends. I’m graduating college in two weeks, and I have a lot of friends from lower grades who communicate primarily through Facebook. Do they know what’s wrong with Facebook, or what social network would be better? How will they get in touch with me? Do they have my e-mail or phone number (I’ll be changing my phone after college)? If I don’t spend enough time to spread this message throughout the summer, I’ll blip off the radar for old friends and acquaintances.
2. A strong alternative isn’t ready yet. I’m placing my hope in Diaspora at the moment, but of course they haven’t produced any code yet, only a statement of purpose and a screenshot or two. And if Diaspora falls through, I’ll be switching to some random network nobody has heard of. It’s simply too early for me to delete my account right now.
3. Facebook is still more convenient than creepy. Creepiness abounds on Facebook: I’m sure my phone number got picked up by this robot. My old profile photo is still publicly available on their servers, even though I deleted it, and people are linking to it. Random websites keep signing me in with my real name. And so forth. This website isn’t very trustworthy. But it’s still useful for knowing what’s going on with my friends. To be sure, it’s less useful now than it was three years ago, and I bet people are getting less and less interesting info out of it. But for summer 2010 at least, it’s still an important tool.
4. Facebook is holding my photos hostage. In their report on the Facebook backlash, Time magazine pointed out:
   

   Being excommunicated from Facebook today would be even more painful. For many people, it’s a second home. Users share more than 25 billion pieces of information with Facebook each month. They’re adding photos — perhaps the most intimate information Facebook collects — at a rate of nearly 1 billion unique images a week. … With 48 billion unique images, Facebook houses the world’s largest photo collection.

   I have hundreds of photos on my Facebook account, as well as photos other people took of me. There’s no way to download them back to my computer, as Google allows for their photo service. Right now I’d have to click through each photo and click “Save As” in my browser. Sure, I can get software to do that for me… for the low price of $2.99. But maybe Facebook will open itself up for free this summer. I’ll give them some time to ponder.

5. Not enough people have been negatively affected. A lot of Facebook users are still in the honeymoon period, because it’s growing so quickly. These are the people who pop up on Internet forums making ridiculous arguments like “Facebook isn’t responsible for your privacy, you are”, or “Everything on the Internet is public” (is everything in your e-mail public? what about your Skype phone calls?). Once they themselves experience Facebook’s problems, they’ll be turned off. But until then, quitting won’t persuade them.

Nevertheless, I appreciate the statement being made. If you want to take a stand and quit Facebook now, add yourself to the list and mark May 31 on your calendar. Good luck!

The aim of this blog is to follow the Diaspora team as they develop their Facebook alternative over the course of this summer, and explain what setting up Diaspora will mean to you, the end user.

Diaspora will be different from Facebook in many ways, and I hope people will be prepared for this. Think about how this will work:

• Having real privacy means people won’t be able to find your wall posts and personal info on Google. Are you prepared to tell your friends where you’ve moved to, face-to-face or through e-mail?
• Having real security will mean we will have to develop a way to demonstrate that we trust our friends, and the websites that claim to be our friends’ blogs. How do you really know who you’re sharing your photos with? My fellow nerds are thinking this is going to be a big challenge for the Diaspora team.
• What does it mean to really own your personal info? Is your identity really yours if you’re entrusting it to a website like Facebook, Yahoo, or Google; or do you turn into the person they claim you are? The Diaspora team is claiming that you will run this software on your own computer, and thus reclaim your data. As you can imagine, this will be a big step for a lot of people. Are you prepared to help your parents or grandparents set this up? Is owning your identity worth it, and what are the pitfalls of entrusting it to someone else?
• What does it mean to truly be free? Freedom isn’t just about downloading software with no price (although you will be able to download Diaspora for free). It also means the freedom to add apps and plug-ins, or even make drastic changes to the code, without the permission of the developers. How will Diaspora change? Will you only be talking to people who run the “official” version, or will there be unofficial hacks as well?

I bet a lot of people are just upset with Facebook and aren’t even thinking about these important questions. But it’s necessary to raise them and investigate them if we want to make a permanent change for the good of the Internet and ourselves.