Right. Because all you need to take on the #2 company on the web with 400 million registered users is a few hundred grand and some newspaper articles.
Really, seriously. The Diaspora guys are probably great people but it takes a bit more than that and the above ingredients to make this happen. They'll have to keep drumming that PR motor without any news at all if anybody is to even remember them by launch day, and they have a very high bar to cross in terms of expectations.
At some point the amount of money you have doesn't matter.
Let me give you one small example: In the netherlands there was a small local site called 'marktplaats' that had nested itself in peoples' consciousness when it came to buying and selling second hand goods.
In the end, Ebay, with a marketing budget that would dwarf most other companies turnover just gave up and bought them, so strong was the power of being the entrenched party.
On that scale 200K bucks and a bit of press amount to nothing.
The party that determines the future in this respect is facebook, and if they don't mess up royally (and there's always a chance for that) the outcome of all this is fairly predictable.
Given everything I know about all this today, and the fact that fall is about 5 months way and that they'll be able to hire an additional 35 man-months of coding time (assuming they themselves will only use that 10K they originally budgeted), that translates in to a team of 11 people that still needs to be broken in and that needs to produce a relatively large amount of software in a very short time.
I put the odds at significantly less than 5% of this succeeding in a way that the first batch of users will be happy. If they find an investor that will give them several years of runway it's a totally different story, but then they still have to unseat facebook.
I hope they'll give it their best shot and that something good will come out of it, instead of just a signal to FB they have a public relations and a privacy issue.
I don't recall these guys ever saying they were trying to take down Facebook. That was the media's spin. A lot of people only understand change in terms of bloody revolution.
They're some geeks with a solid idea and they've got way more cash to build it than most successful open source projects ever see. There is absolutely no problem here. But I guess if you swim with sharks...
A social app, by definition, is governed by the network effect. For it to be successful, it needs much more than a great codebase. It needs users.
Diaspora will need to attract users, and that probably means enticing them to come from elsewhere. The purpose isn't destructive against FB, it's constructive for diaspora.
Really, seriously. The Diaspora guys are probably great people but it takes a bit more than that and the above ingredients to make this happen. They'll have to keep drumming that PR motor without any news at all if anybody is to even remember them by launch day, and they have a very high bar to cross in terms of expectations.
At some point the amount of money you have doesn't matter.
Let me give you one small example: In the netherlands there was a small local site called 'marktplaats' that had nested itself in peoples' consciousness when it came to buying and selling second hand goods.
In the end, Ebay, with a marketing budget that would dwarf most other companies turnover just gave up and bought them, so strong was the power of being the entrenched party.
On that scale 200K bucks and a bit of press amount to nothing.
The party that determines the future in this respect is facebook, and if they don't mess up royally (and there's always a chance for that) the outcome of all this is fairly predictable.
Given everything I know about all this today, and the fact that fall is about 5 months way and that they'll be able to hire an additional 35 man-months of coding time (assuming they themselves will only use that 10K they originally budgeted), that translates in to a team of 11 people that still needs to be broken in and that needs to produce a relatively large amount of software in a very short time.
I put the odds at significantly less than 5% of this succeeding in a way that the first batch of users will be happy. If they find an investor that will give them several years of runway it's a totally different story, but then they still have to unseat facebook.
I hope they'll give it their best shot and that something good will come out of it, instead of just a signal to FB they have a public relations and a privacy issue.
Anything over that and I'll consider it a bonus.