Open source distributed open protocol networks made possible through public funding are always best developed in total secrecy.

Naturally.

To be fair, bikeshedding is equally bad.

And by ignoring all the other projects and open protocols that target the same problem.

This is because interop with OpenId, OAuth, RDF et al is hard so hey, lets go shopping! ...I mean, lets roll our own from scratch, that always works.

In principle, you should be able to follow their progress on the project's posts page: <http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p.... Their latest post was 5 days ago, but "for backers only."

This link works: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p...

The only interesting part of the post is this:

"ps. Progressing along nicely, expect more updates soon, and maybe even screenshots :D"

I got an email version of the post about a week ago.

it was a clarification of the loot policy. since only backers get loot, its for backers only.

These guys are young and I'm not aware of any previous work they have accomplished. The expectations of their work and their obvious inexperience doesn't lead me to think they are going to totally solve the problem by the end of summer. That being said, they are -young and inexperienced- and I am always optimistic that those ingredients can lead to interesting and useful solutions.

I'm happy to sit back and see what happens at the end of the summer. Cut through the extraordinary expectations and just hope they can contribute to this space. They now have the funding to keep the dream alive even after the summer so I think all they need is to iterate one step closer to the solution, not solve it completely. If they show as much, I think it opens up the door for others to join their cause and collaborate towards something greater.

Kickstarter only told me that alot of people were interested in social media privacy. A few people on here noted a while back that the attention and money they did get may ultimately play a role in the failure of this project. IMO, that is a little bit of a reach, but it is also perfectly reasonable. Regardless, I don't think it matters if these guys win- people voted with their money that they think there is room in town for another breed of Facebook, ultimately it will come.

I will agree that it would be nice to see a little bit more public communication, but how can we know they aren't communicating at all? The media they have gotten has had to allow them a foot in the door with all kinds of experts in academia, open source, and the commercial world. I'm sure they are up to their eye-balls in collaborations.

I can't find this one presentation of theirs on scribd. But it had some inkling of their projected path. Technically speaking, I believe they were using Ruby on Rails and MongoDB at the time and of course a lot of encryption details.

Edit: Here's a relevant yet detailed look at what they proposed they'd build: http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/04/30/a-response-to-mr-vill...

I don't believe this project will succeed. It is a project that was completely based on hype. Couple that with the fact that there was a lot of talk over facebook's open graph, Diaspora got a lot of press. Now that that's over, they have to rely on their own wits to make it, which isn't something their team strikes me as capable of doing.

I heard that they got some office space in SF with the help of Pivotal Labs.

Raising money before they know what they even really want to do... sounds like trouble. Maybe they could come up with something though. Time will tell.

This project is over hyped. Over expectation may kill the project. What is supposed to be a facebook killer may end up being a disaster.

Worst comes to worst they can just merge with one of the already-existing distributed social network projects out there and rebrand it to Diaspora:

http://onesocialweb.org/ http://appleseedproject.org/

I hope this isn't the case, but you may be right. Too much money/fame at too early a stage in the project might not be such a good thing.

Don't get high on your own supply.

I think it's going to fail, in the sense that when people who have donated to it see the results they're going to be confused and disappointed. Which is fairly significant fail, but hopefully there will be some useful by-products, as it's supposedly open source and based around open standards.