Honestly, I am dumbfounded at all the money and publicity that is getting thrown at Diaspora when they haven't really accomplished anything yet.

I don't think OneSocialWeb will succeed, either. What will likely happen is Facebook will adjust their course or a slightly different Facebook clone will come out with sensible customer-focused privacy policies (like Mint or Wesabe had) and ways to get your data out if you want to leave.

Absolutely. I'm actually kind of surprised at how relatively inept Google is in the social networking field. They have Orkut, but it's pretty much a flop in the US. I mention it in another comment, but they have pretty much the perfect platform in Wave for building a serious distributed social network, but instead bill it as being a glorified email replacement. And Buzz? Is it even worth talking about?

Mix wave, buzz and blogger, with a HUGE touch of visuals and they may have a winner.

Google sucks at visuals, twitter looks fresh and trendy, buzz looks like shit.

They have the technology and the money, what they need is Apple-like designers.

Me too, but I'm starting to wonder if they're holding off because they don't want to be the subject of antitrust complaints.

Might as well give all those high paid lawyers something to do.

The fact that Diaspora have gotten all that attention actually suggests that they have better odds to succeed - the biggest obstacles to a Facebook replacement aren't technical, after all, but social. They're starting by giving themselves a human face, just like MySpace did.

In my experience I have not seen a correlation between meda hype and success.

Attention is the indicator that they're doing something right socially; it itself is not the victory.

Much of the attention they are getting is down to timing. The real trick is to find a way to sustain attention until they actually deliver something.

Well, they've proved they understand the marketing part of it :)

Edit: that wasn't meant as snark. Marketing and mindshare are important in launching a new enterprise, especially one that sets out to bust an existing paradigm. The Diaspora team have done an excellent job in presenting their project, and taught me a valuable lesson. In the process, they've also created useful publicity for Kickstarter as a launchpad.

What I said in comments on the other story (http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1344138):

"When I last thought about it, I became convinced that we don't need an single implementation, we need standards for multiple implementations to interact. Stuff like RSS, OpenId, OAuth, etc. It's a lot less glamorous to work to these, and to try to push them forward, but it's a lot more useful."

After Diaspora works, it should be easy enough to standardize its protocol. Fixing a non-working, prematurely-standardized protocol is likely to cost more.

Based on other experiences that's "if", not "after".

But no, it's not easy, unless things like OAuth and OpenId implementations are easy to you, which puts you in a very select group.

What about all the other distributed social media experiments, which have been around longer, done more, and are working with established protocols? I still think that this is the real way forward.

OneSocialWeb, Diaspora et all are solving the wrong problem but are getting attention because of the general grumblings about Facebook. The issue causing the most Facebook user dissent is privacy. Open protocols do little to address this; having your whole social graph (think embarrassing pics) sitting on any server out of your control, whoever the owner, is the problem.

What is needed is a system that guarantees privacy by storing your social graph is such a way that it cannot be data-mined, sold, leaked, or linked by other websites. One way to do this is to have all data on the server be encrypted where the key only resides on the client side.

OneSocialWeb does nothing to solve the privacy problem.

I think Diaspora may have this one covered:

http://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html

"Distributed Encrypted Backups"

That's a 'backup', that has nothing to do with all social content on the servers being unreadable to anyone but those in the graph.

I'm with you on the "sold, leaked, and linked" bit, but what's the problem with data-mining?

I haven't read too much on the technical side of things about this yet, but TechCrunch's quick rundown sounds a lot like what I was arguing Wave had the potential to become when it launched a year ago.

If you stepped back from Wave and stopped looking at it as fancified email and instead as an extensible platform for arbitrary data, it seemed blindingly obvious to me that the next step would be to build it out into a full fledged social networking service. The fact that both projects are built on top of XMPP definitely strikes me as interesting, as well.

I've always been a little dumbfounded that the part of Wave everybody talked about was the collaborative text editing type stuff in the I/O demo, when if you read any deeper, it should have been clear that that stuff was just a UX tech demo and that the important part was the underlying technology. OneSocialWeb sounds a lot like somebody is building a similar technology specifically in the direction I thought Wave would go.

Committee. I don't have any grounds for this, but I get the feeling that this is a very typically European project. The website and the fact that it's backed by Vodafone set off my bells. These kinds of projects by states or big corporations usually never launch, but are instead drowning in bureaucracy.

I might be wrong, but this fact alone makes me think Diaspora are doing the right thing in finding their own path.

It doesn't matter a lot to me though, I'm certain that we will build an open social network soon, whether OneSocialWeb, Diaspora or something else.

When that spreadsheet of Facebook alternatives was posted the other day, this one ticked the most boxes. Taking a look at their site though, I was greeted by talk of protocols and invited to 'get code'. I know its just early days, but this isn't how you get people using your social network. I want to jump right in. This... is not what I want.

Yeah, it would be nice if they had an open server that allowed you to sign up and check it out. There's nothing stopping anybody from setting one up though.

The money makes things interesting even though they've made nothing yet. Imagine how things change from a momentum standpoint if they work on the 10 or 15k they planned to this summer and use the rest of the money to get people like Chris Messina and Caterina Fake working on the project

OneSocialWeb is ahead, but their solution is geek-oriented, complex, and ugly. Any solution that's not mom-oriented, simple, and pretty just won't catch on.

Why do these folks complain about publicity - it is an initiative of Vodafone for goodness sake, the worlds largest mobile phone operator.

Well get them to hop on Kickstart, see what happens

No one needs yet another facebook or yet another microsoft.