Herd Instinct

Google's new policy of requiring real names in profiles clearly shows what direction Google is headed. While it is still possible to use a fake name (it's not like Google is demanding to see your ID. Yet.), the new policy is a problem for people who have legitimate reasons to use an obviously invalid name.

So, will this new policy slow down the migration to Google+? Of course not. The success of Facebook has already proven that people are willing to give up their privacy to be where everyone else is hanging out. Call it herd instinct.

For those that do not follow the herd, I provide a list of all distributed social network systems currently under development. For future reference.

Google+

So Google is taking another stab at social networking, with Google+. My first thought was, does it have a federation protocol? Frankly, without federation, Google+ is so... last decade.

Of course, expecting federation in a Google product is kind of ridiculous. Federation gets in the way of what Google does best: mine data. Enabling a distributed system would not be in Google's best interest.

Which is unfortunate because it means Google has lost the perfect opportunity to create a next generation social networking system. Instead, they gave us Facebook with round corners and bevelled edges.

Behind The Times

I got a call from my oldest customer (15+ years!) today. No, it wasn't about work unfortunately. I had made suggestion on her LinkedIn profile which prompted her to see how I was doing. It definitely wasn't a cheerful conversation. Business is very bad for a lot of people.

But that's not what this post is about. We also talked about using social networking as a marketing tool. Of all the people I have worked with in the industrial automation business, she is the only one on LinkedIn. Think about that for a second. Now, if I say that most people in the automation business are hopelessly behind the times, do you think that is a total exaggeration?

(And yes, I'm well aware that I would probably find more of them on Facebook but I have to overcome the Facebook-creeps-me-out factor before I can sign up there.)

Diaspora: First Impression

Myles Braithwaite invited me to the first Disapora site, joindiaspora. Diaspora is still in alpha so one can't be too critical, but I think there is still a lot of work to be done before I would put a beta sticker on it.

For example, after I signed up I got another email that Myles wanted to share with me. When I followed the link in the email, it went straight to my joindiaspora home page, but Myles was not added to my contact list. Now what? Mousing over some items I found the notifications icon but it did not indicate that there were any items, so I ignored it. Later, after getting nowhere, I opened the notifications and there was Myles' offer to share. Much later again, I discovered that the notification indicator does work. So why it not work with the very first item?

Another example is the invite counter. I got ten invites so I asked five people to join. The dialog allowed sending to multiple people so I entered all five email addresses at once. Now the invite counter reads eight. Um, 10-5=8 now? Should I assume that some of the invites were not get sent? If so, which ones? It seems the only way to find out is to ask the invitees if they got it, which is kind of annoying.

My basic rule of programming is: fix the obvious problems first wherever possible. It seems the programmers behind Dispora have a different philosophy. Thankfully this only alpha software so I'll report back when things improve a little.

Hype

With much fanfare, Diaspora, an open source alternative to Facebook, was released a few days ago. Too much fanfare if you ask me. It's way too early to be calling Diaspora an alternative to Facebook. That's just ridiculous. It's the equivalent of Torvalds releasing Linux in 1991 and claiming it is an alternative to all Unix operating systems.

Where there's hype, there's money. Diaspora was funded via Kickstarter to the tune of over $200,000 in crowd sourced money. OK, so it's not millions of dollars, but it buys a lot of hype for an open source project. The problem is that open source projects usually don't survive very long on hype alone.

Meanwhile, what about projects like OpenSocialWeb and Appleseed, which are attempting the same thing as Diaspora, but without the hype.