Diaspora vs. Appleseed - Does anybody care?

So there's been a lot of hype lately about a *new* social networking application called Diaspora. The story is, 4 NYU computer science students decided to "change the world" by declaring a war on the social networking leviathan "Facebook". Their secret weapon: The idea of a "great light-weight distributed social networking framework". The idea is a great one and has been on people's wishlist for years now. Over the last few weeks, the story about these NYU students spread like wildfire. To be frank, this was a very timely declaration. Recent privacy woes with Facebook have made the average internet user more conscious about privacy than ever before. The whole notion of "privacy" has also become more complicated. Its not as black-and-white as private vs. public. Nowadays people are urging for more fine grain control over who has access to their information.

So, how does the team at NYU plan to tackle this problem. I headed over to their blog to find out more. From what I could gather, Diaspora is sort of a distributed social graph sharing application. Let me clarify that uber-condensed definition. A social graph is a graph where the nodes are people and/or objects that can be shared, and there is an edge between the nodes if they are somehow related. For example, two users are related if they are friends, or a photo is related to you if you had posted it. The main problem with today's social networks is that our social graph is locked behind a walled garden of big corporations. This lets them do whatever they want with the social graph. They could, for instance, sell it to advertisers so that targeted ads can be displayed on your profile. Moreover, even if you delete your social networking account, the company, in theory, could still retain your social graph, posts, videos etc and make money out of it. The way out of this mess would if you could host your social graph on your own computer or on a rented server. And that's exactly what Diaspora is. It's a little piece of server software that stores your social graph locally and exposes a web API so that the world can access it. So you are really the owner of your social graph. The reason this is distributed is that everybody installs their own instance of Diaspora and the instances talk to each other and creates the network.

Sounds great right? Yes it does, but only in theory. If the world was full of computer geeks like us, Facebook would have never been born. And we would all be running Diaspora instances on our machines. The truth is, Diaspora won't be a program that a typical user would be able to install easily. It will most likely consist of a whole stack of server software like LAMP. Moreover, the whole stack would need to be cross-platform. The average user won't be pleased if he is required to have a Linux machine to be able to join a social network. Sure you can allow a hosting service provider run the software for you. But that's also not as easy as filling out a simple sign-up form. Moreover, to an average user, this will sound like "Diaspora claims to be different because it wants me to submit my sensitive data to site B instead of site A."

To me, it's clear as daylight. It won't work. No matter how solid the Diaspora platform might be, it won't be adopted in a large scale. Ask the guy from Appleseed, his implementation of the Diaspora-predecessor has been around for about 6 years. Almost nobody has ever heard of it. Here I would like to make a bold statement. Any "new social networking solution" that relies on people installing software on their laptops or desktops, or signing up with hosting services will *never* work. People just won't do it.

If you want to be practical, you need a solution that is just as simple as Facebook or Hi5, if not simpler. Anything more complicated, no matter how shiny it is, won't be adopted. We need to revisit what problems we are having with current social networking platforms. We need to identify the *real* problems from the perspective of the user. Then we should try to design a solution that addresses these issues. Stay tuned for the next post where I will discuss my take on the solution.