On Fri, 2010-05-28 at 21:16 +0100, Nathan wrote: > Miron Cuperman wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > We have a common goal. We would like people to control their destiny by > > moving from proprietary social networks to distributed ones (dsns). > > > > However, social networks are like the Internet and the telephone, and > > unlike, for example, Mailman or PHP. Mailman and PHP are tools. You > > pick them up, use them, deploy them, then put them aside for awhile. A > > social network is only useful when used in collaboration with your > > friends and under daily engagement. A social network has very different > > adoption dynamics from the tools that you used or helped develop. > > > > For a new social network to succeed, its adoption cannot be > > incremental. It has to be a rapid exponential. After you join, 10 of > > your friends must join within 3 days, and 50 within 3 months. Otherwise > > it will fail, just like others have failed. (I think the Diaspora guys > > get the adoption part. I don't know about their tech...) > > > > Your intuition is that you can incrementally develop a system and that > > it will be incrementally implemented and adopted. This intuition is wrong. > > > > The only way to succeed is to have a "big bang" release. There must be > > an adoption date chosen and a compelling message (like "quit FB day", > > but with a positive alternative). There has to be an easy to adopt dsn > > that is not too fragmented or confusing. Usability has to be > > excellent. There has to be virality built in. You must be encouraged > > to invite your friends and it is easy to do so. The default message to > > your friends must be compelling. You must be able to find your friends > > if they are already on. The user experience must be on par with what > > they are used to. > > If you've got an open decentralized social network.. then why would you > need to invite anybody? to where exactly? and why a 'big bang', I can > see why if you're 'just another silo' trying to play catch up with > twitter, facebook et al - but not for this - unless of course, I > completely misunderstand what everybodies thinking & talking about. > To get them out of the silos. There is no way to interoperate with Facebook. There is evil there that does not sleep.
> Regardless though, virality (?sp), is completely built in - make good, > useful tools, where the user controls their own destiny+data, and you're > done - build it well and the masses will come, build it badly and.. well > no loss in the scheme of things because other will build good things :) > > AFAICT, this isn't really a flash in the pan thing, a miss it and you've > messed up scenario - this is the ground work for the next generation of > the web - pretty much an unstoppable movement. I completely disagree. I think it's dangerous to assume that just because things are "right", they're unstoppable - it's perfectly possible for the silos to take over and for Facebook to reign forever. Picture a boot datamining a human social graph, controlling all the world's data, over and over, forever. Diaspora does understand virality. They managed to get almost 200k by capitalizing on Facebook users' dissent. What I think they missed, though, was the fact that nobody will care about what Facebook did in May in September. For that reason, I think Diaspora will have a fizzle launch, and maybe pick up the next time Facebook does something if nothing better has replaced them.
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