I also know the owner (http://twitter.com/jmk) - it's definitely real, and not an ad campaign :), though I do appreciate the skeptic instinct.
He's been posting off/on to his personal FB/Flickr accounts about the stolen laptop saga for a few months now, and mentioned setting something like this up to try and get some attention after he pretty much exhausted all his other avenues. Looks like that part worked :)
Hope someone recognizes the scumbag (if he turns out the be the thief that is...)
Negative comments? Eat em up. Take note of what people dislike (be it even solely out of jealousy or spite, which is the vibe some of these comments give me) and work them into making your next creation even better.
It's easy to criticize. Surely anyone who does like it doesn't have much to say other than an obvious "it's good".
I don't think it's wrong though that people point out what they don't like, or would improve on. It's doesn't mean the person giving feedback is right, but it does allow the person who created it to take it into consideration.
Honestly, if you get feedback that's 'hard to take' it's probably because you know it needs to be changed.
Agreed. As a newbie in the HN community hoping to share some of my work soon, this is really disappointing. There's a difference between being constructively critical and judging. I would welcome more of the former.
Don't let it stop you. Understand going in that there will be noise in the feedback, and to sort through it to extract the valuable feedback. Its not personal, because the judgmental don't really know you.
They're doing a difficult thing by making an effort to share progress as it happens in a transparent way, and I think that deserves a lot of credit. They never said they would be the anti-Facebook, they never said it would be perfect, and they're working on a solution to a very complex problem.
Really great job for a weekend project - visual design is very slick. Look forward to seeing it a bit more feature-complete. Would love to use something like this with my team.
Great to hear that you like it. We certainly have plans to add some features to it, especially better integration with more external services (bug trackers, etc.)
Just gave it a spin and it's a really cool product - feels a bit buggy at the moment but for the right application this would be a really valuable tool to have. Great job, guys.
Hi Kevin, great to hear! I'm curious what felt buggy. Feel free to email us at support@optimizely.com and give us a heads up. We'd love to look into it!
A better title might have been "Some thoughts on the Diaspora software license and contributor agreement."
It's alpha software. It's not perfect. They're not going to get everything right on the first go, be it software bugs or maybe-too-restrictive licensing. Let's give it more than 24 hours before declaring it 'dead.'
Hate to be the downer, but the problem with this is that people don't really care about privacy. The NYTimes and every other mainstream news publication has been running this exact same story for five years: "New edgy upstart ______ is aiming to be the antidote to FB/Twitter oversharing by introducing innovative privacy controls..."
Most, if not all, of those services have seen a brief flurry of activity before eventually withering and dying. People don't truly care about privacy -- they like the idea of their privacy being important, in theory. No combination of new features, openness, or distributed systems is going to be able to overcome the fact that people largely only care about two things when it comes to social networking: being on the network that the most of their friends are on, and having their stuff seen by the most amount of people possible.
If you ask, people will tell you until they're breathless that privacy is important to them -- but almost no one will ever touch the robust privacy controls they asked for.
People keep saying this, but i don't think it is true. People do care about privacy quite allot, many will lower the shades when they undress, not all of them speak about their sexual identity for instance, a good number of people are nervous about the census, or get worried about NSA wiretapping.
What seems to be the case is that people are largely unaware what kind of data collection mechanisms are in place.
There is a growing concern, and it is not just facebook, it is very distressing to people when they find that their gmail\yahoo\whatever has been hacked and "they" ware sending Viagra ads to all their friends and colleagues.
I often meet people burned in such manner, and their attitude about online security changed dramatically, often without guidance they do not know how to approach the problem.
In addition the interface always gives a sense of security by abstracting your communication with other people.
There is a great market potential for a private by default.
The average user may not think about privacy that much but when ex-husbands start responding to pictures of their kids I'm sure even most house wives will start looking for an alternative (and spread the word like wild fire). Give it a couple of years and Oprah will be deleting her account on live TV. Twitter was geek-only for years until they suddenly went main-stream.
He's been posting off/on to his personal FB/Flickr accounts about the stolen laptop saga for a few months now, and mentioned setting something like this up to try and get some attention after he pretty much exhausted all his other avenues. Looks like that part worked :)
Hope someone recognizes the scumbag (if he turns out the be the thief that is...)