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.