I can't see how this will work, at all. No one is going to "install their own node." It's like OpenID: a huge pain in the ass. Will my girlfriend use this? No. My sister? No. The friends that I work on cars with or ride bikes with? No. My hacker buddies who are paranoid and anti-government? Possibly. Even I won't use it... and I live inside of a terminal and write code for a living. I commend the idea... but this isn't going to make even the smallest dent in Facebook.
I have no idea why people are donating money to this. Might as well flush it down your toilet.
P.S. I'm not trying to piss people off here, I'd honestly like to hear someone explain to me why this is worth even $1.
I'd honestly like to hear someone explain to me why this is worth even $1.
It's worth at least $5 or even $10 dollars to me. That's effectively, "I'll buy you guys a pizza." (Or, here in NYC, a couple or three slices of pizza. But it's good pizza, damn it.) I'm not especially worried about whether or not this project conquers the world, or beats Facebook (which I could care less about one way or the other). The motivation here is just some interesting people with a lot of passion doing something they care about. Giving them a little money is like buying a beer for someone in a bar you just met who is telling a great story. It's not really goal oriented, just sociable. (And that's the difference between this and flushing money down the toilet.)
The larger result relies on the magic of lots and lots of individually small donations. A small amount of money like this doesn't hurt me at all, but a whole big lot of donations like this add up to $50,000 in a hurry apparently.
That's certainly a lot of people buying them a pizza, but there is also a significant number of people buying them 10 DVDs or a four course meal for two, and even a few are buying them a months rent.
Yup, but note that the larger donations come with larger "rewards" later. Everyone above $350 gets a free year from the future subscription service. The $2000 and up donator gets a computer down the line. I wonder if the larger donations move down (up?) the continuum from encouragement towards investment.
They will release code for anyone to host their own site, but provide a subscription service for people that do not want to manage the code. I'd imagine some of the sites will be free, but they may not have all of the features possible. For example a company may want to use the subscription service for internal use but not want to host it.
Early adopters and contributers might be interested in installing their own nodes. If it manages to gain any traction, all you will need to do is find a hosting service. A little niche economy will spring up hosting these things for $1 a month, or just for your ad eyeballs. If you don't like the price of this one, or that one is sketchy, just move your stuff to another provider. Or run your own. People figured out how to install IM clients when that was the thing. A "desktop" version could easily be made.
From what little I've read on the subject, I take it the model will be something like WordPress or Status.Net or Jabber/XMPP — some people will download the tarball and install it on their own system, but most people will just sign up with a central provider - wordpress.com, identi.ca, Google Talk. As long as the two groups can interact more-or-less seamlessly (unlike, say, LiveJournal where the code is available but running your own instance cuts you off from the main network), that's all we need.
I know a lot of non-technical people who dislike facebook due to its current policies and would use something else they could. If enough excitement builds and enough people sign on uickly enough, it could have the bandwagon effect necessary to take off. There's no telling at this point, but it will be interesting nonetheless.
Seriously, this.
I'm very happy people wanted to give them some money so they can hack all summer with no financial worries, but this is just too much.
This won't go anywhere, even most of the people in this tech community won't use it, let alone someone like my girlfriend.
We get it, facebook is going too far, but this isn't the answer
It could easily be distributed in a fashion similar to say bittorrent. Whatsay each node contains it's own users's data, as well as the data from several other users. When you look for someone, your node looks for the nearest node containing that person's data. Theoretically, something like this could be impervious to small scale outages. That would give it an edge even on Facebook.
I'm guessing they'll clue in soon enough that that is not the way to go, they've got enough brainpower to work that one out and come up with the 5K or 10K per node solution.
Much better cost wise too, friends can pool for a node and take on a bunch of excess from poor countries or so. Or use locality effects to keep things near each other on the same box because of the bigger chance of them being connected.
Nothing a week long hashing out session won't solve before they start laying bricks.
Wait, I don't understand. Was that a response to his entire comment, or just the "it'll be a pain in the ass to run a node" part? Because I don't see anything a weeklong hashing-out session is going to do about the fact that his bike friends are never going to use this.
If it is implemented properly I'm guessing in the end it will come down to a few nodes parked in your neighbourhood, an https connection to a website and a management layer that is as transparent as possible under the hood.
So it would look like facebook but no central company stores the data.
That's how I would try to put it together. That way the local neighbourhood nerds can bask in the glory of being a 'node' (give them a sticker to put on their front door or something, 'diaspora lives here'), and the bike(r) dudes are not going to have to learn anything they didn't already know how to do on fb.
Put the domain and any centralized resources in a foundation to make sure it can't be hijacked by someone that suddenly decides to go 'evil'.
edit: hello dear downvoter, please elaborate on your vote.
This actually seems like a bad idea at this point. As I understand it these four guys are going to get 50,000+ (maybe 100+ by the time all is said and done) in donations to implement this concept.
The first problem I have is that this is entirely too much money. This is an open-source project. The idea is not for them to take a salary. They really just need money for living expenses for the summer.
Second, I don't see any seasoned mentors in the picture. Not to be crass but I think young people are silly (I am a young person and I am no exception.) I think the money is overscoped and the time is underscoped. I can see a lot of that money being wasted. Prove me wrong guys.
Third, since this is not the typical investor/entrepreneur relationship, the incentives are much different. This is not a loan, where they will feel super motivated to deliver because if they don't they will lose money. This is not an equity investment where an investor puts in money and has a say on the direction of the project. This is basically a really big grant(1) from 1,573 people who trust them with their money based on a 5 minute video. If they fail, who do they have to answer to(2)? They can always just say, "hey, we are four students who bit off more than we can chew." I think they will deliver something but I am not writing "social networking revolution" into my calendar for September 2010 at this point.
I am totally happy for them, and happy that someone is doing this, but I am also skeptical that the final result will be anything revolutionary.
1 Regarding the donation structure:
"Projects must comply with Amazon Payments' Acceptable Use Policy. Among Amazon's restrictions:
*Loans, investment, and any kind of financial return are forbidden
*Lotteries, raffles, and sweepstakes are not allowed" taken from http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines
2 They answer to themselves from what I gather: "Who is responsible for making sure project creators deliver what they promise? Project creators are wholly responsible for their promises. Kickstarter is a venue, like eBay or Etsy." taken from http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq#WhoIsRespForMakiSureProj...
re: 1: these are not loans or investments but donations
re: 2: that's the worrying bit. But there is nothing lost by trying, we'll all learn from this.
If they fail, then we can analyze why they failed. If they succeed there will be a lot of attempts to copy this success. There already will be I believe.
Something new is happening here, crowdsourced funding on a relatively significant scale.
And I think you could safely add a 0 to your estimate of how much money they'll end up with, which will give them several things: Investors will see the concept as 'validated' by the target audience before they've even written a single line of code. And big name companies with resources and experience will fall over each other by next Friday to have their name associated with this effort.
If they're smart they sell their skins dear and get a reputable investor on board for the expertise they miss and the networking factor.
The excess money will give them runway and extra clout during negotiations.
The crowd-sourcing aspect of this has me really excited. I think it is awesome that people are throwing their support behind these four random guys with a dream.
The skeptic inside me says, who the hell are these guys anyway? And how do I know they will act responsibly? And even if they attempt to act responsibly how do we know anything will come of it in a sub-optimal situation (sub-optimal in my point of view because they have little experience, no mentors, and don't have to answer to anyone. I don't think a great amount of experience is necessary but when combined with the other two it just doesn't look good.)
Also, it just seems like this system is ripe for abuse. If I just want 50,000 bucks it seems like I can use Kickstarter to mobilize people around some fake or inflated cause, do little to no work, and pocket the money.
No offense to Kickstarter, I participated in "New York Makes a Book"!
[EDIT] Also, I agree with pretty much everything you said. All of that can and will happen in the best case scenario, but how likely is it?
Highly unlikely at the moment. Another 20 days of favorable press and a 0 behind the current figure and they're in the 'viable' department, even if they themselves are not capable of pulling it off they'll have to funds to attract the expertise to nail it and they'll have the 'ins' with VCs they need for the rest.
Hopefully they'll pick something like YC for their source of knowledge. Or they might crowd source that too, no telling. Already people are offering them fat pipes, infrastructure expertise and so on.
They're currently pulling in $3500 per hour, it is accelerating rather than slowing down. If they hit a feedback loop (if that isn't already happening) this will be the start-up story of the year. By some measures it already is.
edit: they just picked up another $2K donation, $55,429 now, that's a 10% increase in about an hour and half.
Alarm bells start ringing in my head whenever I see a "bandwagon" pattern. I always think to myself, is the popularity warranted here and I think the answer here is a resounding "no." The ratio of information provided to money donated is waaay to low and to me this indicates that people don't have a great idea of what they are donating to. Then again maybe there is very little harm since most people are donating very little money. If they raise 500,000 dollars that would be a truly remarkable outcome that I did not expect.
Yes, the bandwagon pattern is very scary, but then again, it was the bandwagon effect that made facebook in what it is, I think that the frustration with facebook is what is driving it and that would almost have to follow the same pattern.
The harm will be if they fail. Even if they ship something in the next 6 months I'll be really impressed.
I think your underestimating the cost of taking on a 6 year old business with 400 million users and $500m in revenue. I'd be more worried if they only got $10k.
Currently they are at $82,690 for 1945 backers which is $42.51 each, does anyone really care if it doesn't work out? Before you answer think about people spending $499 on an iPad, a device they don't need and might not even work on their WiFi [I'll be buying one anyway].
Also, don't forget that each of the donations is essentially a pre-payment for some part of the service if it succeeds.
Those who use this model can avoid securities law problems by using a donor model, which is fine in itself.
Traditional donations, however, are made to charities and similar 501(c)(3) organizations that are bound by pretty strict rules and by fiduciary duties which, among other things, require that: (1) all assets must be permanently dedicated to the charitable purpose; (2) those who manage the charity cannot misdirect assets for their personal profit or pay themselves inflated salaries that amount to misappropriation; (3) those who manage are bound by fiduciary duties to do so consistent with the purposes of the organization and face severe penalties for violating such fiduciary duties; and (4) those who manage must render a strict financial accounting for their activities and make their books and records available for appropriate inspection to assure integrity.
No such safeguards are built into crowd funding, as the system really depends on a "trust me" attitude. This may be fine in any given project if the founders have the talent, vision, and integrity to comport themselves consistently with the trust placed in them to do what they say they will do when they solicit the donations. If they do not have integrity, however, I am not sure what remedies might exist if they should prove less than scrupulous in dealing with the donated funds.
This is a pretty new area and I'm not very familiar with it. But it would appear on the surface that there is not much that can be done if founders in such situations choose to abuse the trust reposed in them by the donors. Given this problem, I don't see how this model can easily be replicated across a meaningful spectrum of situations, even though it might work for select high profile cases.
Spreedly just finished their crowdsourced funding on Kickstarter on May 6. I have to presume that they've had some lawyers help out since then. I'd really love to see what they came up with to find a clear path. If there really is a viable donor model path for funding (I believe that Blogger did this for a bit as well) that is replicable, that could really change things nicely. Then you've got product/market fit, MVP, paying customers, and all the other stuff in one nice, neat package.
Spreedly's Kickstart package was different than Kickstarter the bounty site. Spreedly actually sold an expensive, "lifetime" service rather than just asking for money to do anything.
We bought one, I think it was $700 for a lifetime of no monthly fees and transaction fees pegged at 1%.
Can anyone reading this thread with expertise comment on the idea that such 'donations' to a for-profit entity (or other project/implicit partnership) would be subject to income or gift taxes?
I'm presuming they are going to work on this for four months, and open source the code. Four People * Four Month = 16 People Months = $3100/Month for a project that I don't see a lot of financial incentive.
If they're half decent developers, they could, without blinking, get a job at $72K/year, which means, they are taking a 50% pay cut to do something interesting and useful, and perhaps educational, while simultaneously voicing the pain we all fell about the direction Facebook is going.
I sent them $25 (or, at least, pledged it to kickstarter) because I applaud anybody who goes to the effort to do something like this. I sent Firefox $25 to get their NYT advertisement.
These all seem like useful diversions of money, not sure what's up with the detractors - You think the developers at RedHat/Novell/IBM aren't taking a (much larger) salary to work on Open Source projects?
the really annoying point of this, from my perspective, is that it's only when they're done that they're going to open source the code.
if they'd keep their code open throughout the process, then people can push them code and help them out, and then we'd end up with a product that the community could stand behind, and ensure that it is portable, and release it as a stand alone program with all the goodness that it needs -- firewall tunneling, being a cross platform easy to deploy app, being fast, whatever
If you were to push a feature to them instead of donating 25$ to their 'project', we'd all be a lot better off, and much much closer to our goal, then buying a group of four undergrads from nyu a slice of pizza
There is no doubt that what they are doing is good and in the spirit of the hacker ethic. I think what they are doing is great. To me it seems like they are getting too much money and I have my doubts about what the final result will be...
The comments on the kickstarter site are quite interesting to read, the mix in gender is relatively balanced and it does not seem to be a 'techie' crowd at all.
Just lots of people that wish these kids luck and don't mind throwing some money on the table for them to go and play with.
I really wonder how high it will go, they're in a feedback loop now, more $ means more press which in turn means more $.
An easy way to deal with this would be to say, preferably in the promotion video, something like "if we receive the desired $10000 amount then no further donations will be accepted", or to nominate a charity which any surplus donations would go to. If they receive a large amount of money and then don't deliver much at the end of the summer then there could be a lot of negative publicity.
But I wish the diaspora developers well, and hope that they deliver something which is at least a foundation for a privacy respecting social network in future. Clearly there is a need for some software filling this role, and enough people are fed up with the status quo to put money towards a solution.
its amazing to see what publicity on places like HN have done to this. I pledged a few days ago before i saw the first post on here, within a few hours they went from 3k to 10k. I really do hope they turn out something good
I feel like kickstarter.com has it backwards. I feel like they should:
1) Put up ideas.
2) Raise money for them.
3) Have people apply to try to execute them.
Not that I have anything against these four kids, but I imagine this idea could be executed better by a different set of people. For example, as most of the HN community news knows, four co-founders is a lot and usually not optimal.
That's a good point, the anti-facebook hype is definitely what drives this (and facebook is helping nicely), but for other ventures it may not be so easy to get the public mobilized.
Throwing $10 or $50 on the table for a bunch of strangers out of frustration is probably quicker done than out of interest for a good but unproven idea.
If linux hadn't happened someone could go and suggest to rewrite windows in 3 months if $10,000,000 is pledged.
There must be other sources of frustration on the web.
When I saw the "share this on Facebook" button on this page, I was overcome by the shadenfreulich irony, and had to click it - not quite the first web page I've ever shared on Facebook, but pretty close...
The most important result of this endeavor would not be the implementation, but an open, de facto standard protocol. Has anyone seen any mention that such a protocol would be formalized?
I'm having deja vu about the decentralizing-diaspora that followed classic-Napster.
Diaspora == Facetella?
Ultimately, one of the biggest winners there was the closed-source but relatively efficient and enforcement-resistant Kazaa, from the Skype founders. But open-protocol (Gnutella) and open-source (LimeWire) options also did alright.
Today, Skype as an again-independent company could be a dark horse candidate for a decentralized, enhanced-privacy but closed-code Facebook-competitor.
These people are getting obscene amounts of money that
a)a very small proportion of web is going to use
b)is going to be built by 4 guys who presumably can live off there computers but can now afford there own office space or something and live like kings.
I'm not sure where you're from, but nobody is living like a king in NYC (or most any other major US city) for that amount of money.
Also, if you compare the ~$90k they've raised so far with some recently VC funded social media startups, all of a sudden it won't seem "obscene"- in fact it seems positively lean and scrappy.
Those startups are going to give the VCs back something. They will make profit. But this is something which will not be making profit. Its a non profit thing and the people pledging money will not get a penny out of it (may be some rewards but that's for major investors.
I admit the over exaggeration on the "living like a king" part but I fail to see any analogy with VC funded social startups and this
I have no idea why people are donating money to this. Might as well flush it down your toilet.
P.S. I'm not trying to piss people off here, I'd honestly like to hear someone explain to me why this is worth even $1.