Mh, yes, now that i think of it... my first thought was "woah, i'll have to pay 10 times as much for one apple share", but in reality i'd just say "in invest 1000$ in whatever company, regardless of how many shares".. if the share goes up 10% it doesn't matter how many shares.. well.. my bad, as i said, i've no real interest in that stuff :P
So, all in all, this means that Apple is seen as much worth as MS (and not 10 times more). That's a point of view i didn't consider..
Still, i would really like to see the income sources of both and how much income is generated where, that'd be interesting.
Diaspora has already had its run in the media, they were at their peak pulling in $4500 per hour in donations, they've fallen back to < $1000 per day now.
The media has given them a nice old time of it (especially a major article about them taking on facebook and pointing people to kickstarter) but they failed to fan the fire as far as I can see, they're well in to the 'valley of despair' now media wise, unless they cook up some stunt.
Otherwise their next shot at a media slot is launch day, and they better not mess it up.
News is fickle that way.
And they have a bit of a delivery problem ahead of them, the expectations are way beyond reasonable at this point.
If they manage to pull it off I'll be most surprised, if they manage to take > 1% marketshare away from facebook without active help from facebook I'll be even more surprised.
Yeah, sucks to be them. They only raised 10x what they needed without giving up any control. Now all they can do is build the app they wanted to build and try to squeeze by as a well funded internet startup with great PR.
Right. Because all you need to take on the #2 company on the web with 400 million registered users is a few hundred grand and some newspaper articles.
Really, seriously. The Diaspora guys are probably great people but it takes a bit more than that and the above ingredients to make this happen. They'll have to keep drumming that PR motor without any news at all if anybody is to even remember them by launch day, and they have a very high bar to cross in terms of expectations.
At some point the amount of money you have doesn't matter.
Let me give you one small example: In the netherlands there was a small local site called 'marktplaats' that had nested itself in peoples' consciousness when it came to buying and selling second hand goods.
In the end, Ebay, with a marketing budget that would dwarf most other companies turnover just gave up and bought them, so strong was the power of being the entrenched party.
On that scale 200K bucks and a bit of press amount to nothing.
The party that determines the future in this respect is facebook, and if they don't mess up royally (and there's always a chance for that) the outcome of all this is fairly predictable.
Given everything I know about all this today, and the fact that fall is about 5 months way and that they'll be able to hire an additional 35 man-months of coding time (assuming they themselves will only use that 10K they originally budgeted), that translates in to a team of 11 people that still needs to be broken in and that needs to produce a relatively large amount of software in a very short time.
I put the odds at significantly less than 5% of this succeeding in a way that the first batch of users will be happy. If they find an investor that will give them several years of runway it's a totally different story, but then they still have to unseat facebook.
I hope they'll give it their best shot and that something good will come out of it, instead of just a signal to FB they have a public relations and a privacy issue.
I don't recall these guys ever saying they were trying to take down Facebook. That was the media's spin. A lot of people only understand change in terms of bloody revolution.
They're some geeks with a solid idea and they've got way more cash to build it than most successful open source projects ever see. There is absolutely no problem here. But I guess if you swim with sharks...
A social app, by definition, is governed by the network effect. For it to be successful, it needs much more than a great codebase. It needs users.
Diaspora will need to attract users, and that probably means enticing them to come from elsewhere. The purpose isn't destructive against FB, it's constructive for diaspora.
when I type an email I have an expectation that only I and the recipient will see the email.
similarly, a vast majority of these people are not intending to broadcast these updates into the public space (non-anonymously with a photo of their face attached next to the update)
I personally don't have any moral outrage over this, but that is the issue. You've built up an expectation of privacy with people and then took it away without enough user messaging. One dialog if I remember correctly, saying something along the lines of "Share your updates with everyone." (what does "everyone" even mean?)
tldr: you switched the defaults on people and they haven't realized it.
It should be a unified, filterable timeline of calls, voicemails, and txts (look ma, a newsfeed!)
I communicate with people (often the same people) through multiple mediums throughout the day. The most important information to me is what occured in the last 10 minutes, hour, day. why should I have to manually switch between types?
Open up one screen, flip through unread messages, voicemails, and calls.
