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...)
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.
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.
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.
Yeah. The same is true of certain actions like '[name] commented on [otherName]'s photo' - you used to be able to control those kinds of feed stories but no longer.
I think the 'don't put anything you want kept private on the internet' is, generally, a good argument. I will say though, that I do think Facebook encouraged a reasonable expectation that certain data would be 'private,' and that's since changed.
Yeah - all the relevant details are in there, and he's technically right about the CC# liability bit, but the last way you want to come off in a situation like this is "it's not all that bad..."
This is honestly one of the most poorly-written 'articles' I've ever read: "The process of simplification of consumer goods in response to demand is what has delivered the enormous productivity gains that generate much of the wealth of modern life."
What does that even mean? How about this: "Think about light switches, for example. Homebuilders, these days, put all the wiring inside the walls where you can't see it, and power is generated miles away from sources. Most people couldn't generate a current if their life depended on it; they just know that if you flick the switch the light turns on and if it doesn't you change the bulb or check the circuit breaker (the equivalent of hitting restart) before calling in the experts."
I know that dumbing ideas down to the point of meaninglessness is sorta the status quo of mainstream journalism, but at least have a little respect for your readers...
One thing that I'd love to see your guys' hands on is the notion of 'ownership' of FB photos -- this is something that was definitely in the DNA of Divvyshot, and it would be really interesting to see FB explore some models of shared/group ownership of content.
Agreed, but Occam's Razor seems too tempting not to consider in this situation. What's more likely, that Google decided overnight to get wise to the 'evil-being' that they might have been underwriting in China for the last 5 years, or that the business circumstances shifted such that an exit from the Chinese search market made more sense for the company, and a story was thus spun?
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...)