Back in July, I asked the question “what ever happened to diaspora?” As I found out, they were doing just fine, working away coding their first release. Well, today they’ve hit the milestone of a developers release; people all over can work on the open source code. Kind of like the Linux of social networks…I guess?
Some interesting takeaways from their blog post:
First of all, privacy on the web is an illusion, no matter how robust your technology is.
We began the summer a list of technologies, and a few bold claims and the goal to make an intrinsically more private social network. The overwhelming response that we elicited made us realize that technology woudn’t be enough. Even the most powerful, granular set of dropdowns and checkboxes will never give people control over where their content is going, let alone give them ownership of their digital self.
Second, when it comes to the social networks of today, there are still things that can (and should) be fixed. What I’m referring to here is this:
This image, from “The Real Life Social Network” by Paul Adams, Google UX, makes the point that offline, people have multiple, independent groups of friends, while online they’re all thrown into one big bucket. According to Adams’ research, this causes several problems:
1) Status updates are often directed to specific groups, which means the larger group is seeing meaningless or odd-sounding updates. 
2) Similarly, when sharing pictures from one group, other groups can see them, even when you might not want them to. (Yes, you can change settings so this doesn’t happen, but this isn’t fundamentally part of the experience — it’s a work around that many people don’t get around to)
3) And finally, because we have to talk to everyone at once, we often choose to say nothing, which defeats the purpose of social networking.
How is diaspora going to fix this? Well, I’m hoping the answer lies with a core feature, called “aspects.” Here’s what they say about it:
We live our real lives in context, speaking from whatever aspect of ourselves that those around us know. Social tools should work the same way. Getting the source into the hands of developers is our first experiment in making a simple and functional tool for contextual sharing.
At this point, who really knows what will become of diaspora. In any case, it looks good. And I just can’t imagine Facebook lasting forever.
As always, I’m happy to hear what you think about it.