Diaspora Beta
Diaspora: We have come up with a plan to get our beta out the door by early 2012; http://eicker.at/DiasporaBeta
Diaspora: We have come up with a plan to get our beta out the door by early 2012; http://eicker.at/DiasporaBeta
JoinDiaspora.com seems to be on the #Beta stage since several hours. First impressions are: clean and faster! Some minor features are missing.
Daniel Grippi: “#diaspora just got hella faster. <3 takes a bow with dennis & dan"
Dennis Collective: “Not officially beta yet, alpha logo coming back soon, but I’m glad you noticed the speedup, we’ve been working on that for weeks.”
Dennis Collective: “TL;DR Stream re-written, now 3x faster, some features not here yet. Diaspora* is still in alpha, so it’s better to ship this faster (sexier) version sooner rather than later. – Dan Hansen, Daniel Grippi, and I have been working for the last month re-architecting the front-end to do a lot of rendering client side using backbone.js. – This has made the stream 3x faster. – We’ll write a more comprehensive blog article tomorrow, but in brief: We are not at 100% feature parity with the current version yet. We’re working on it. This new version is way faster, which should hopefully be more enjoyable. Users are sure to encounter a bunch of (hopefully small) bugs, but we figured that the benefit of having a stream that goes three times faster, outweighs all the negatives. – Thanks!“
Diaspora: “Diaspora is Growing and Changing Fast! – Diaspora continues to grow in popularity, this is awesome! Keeping up with this increasing demand on our servers is fun and challenging… Working towards these efforts, Dan Hansen, Dennis Collinson, and Daniel Grippi have spent the last month working on moving the stream over to a more modern architecture. You may have noticed some minor differences in Diaspora today, these are symptoms of a major re-write that’s going on under her surface. Yesterday, we decided that this new version, which uses Backbone.js to render the stream is mature enough to push out to all of you Fabulous Alpha Users. … We will be trimming down and streamlining Diaspora’s code-base in the near-term. This goes in line with our goals of making Diaspora easier to develop, and more performant. If you’re a developer who fancies making code beautiful, we’d love to have you on board!“
Hi Gerrit,
I had been following your comments inside Diaspora. Now I have some problems logged in being user of https://social.mathaba.net.
It is exactly since these days you are writing here about 8. January 2012 “seems to be on the #Beta … Some minor features are missing. ..” – But I have really problems there and not only missing some features. If I am allowing Java Script for this site now like before then it is running automatically to “https://social.mathaba.net/stream#stream”, nearly not important what I had wanted to be connected to!
Of course you could answer me into German also because it is my mother tongue.
And of course I am very interested to get Beta soon and I would like to host it also and being active for advertisement to spread it like I had been written in a comment of your messages once.
Best wishes, Steffen
Steffen, I’m sorry, but I’ve got no clue what’s wrong there. Maybe Silvia Morgenstern might help? She’s on your Pod too.
Thanks Gerrit. I have written now about this problem in blocking Java script because problem is still same like nearly one week ago. It is already if people want sign up it is impossible without blocking Java script to see this window long enough because it is automatically running back also. So I cannot read anything inside “Diaspora Mathaba” now. That’s why I had written there in tag “#bug” that they should use your site here to answer because I cannot read anything there. But because I had to block Java script to make this window usable for writing text and click to send it, because of this I am worrying that it had been send really. Because I cannot ready anything there I cannot write there to Silvia Morgenstern also. Let’s hope and wait for better Diaspora we need very much. Best wishes, Steffen
Steffen, I’m not sure if this is about the Diaspora software or about Mathaba’s settings? – PS: Edited your post to make your links work.
Content focused templates to emerge on JoinDiaspora.com soon; http://j.mp/z7NGyB
Diaspora just hit a quarter of a million Diaspora Seeds on the developers’ Diaspora Pod alone; http://eicker.at/DiasporaGrowth
Social business: harnessing intelligence, measuring community health, moving to engagement; http://eicker.at/SocialBusiness
Hinchcliffe: “As businesses begin looking strategically at big data as a way to improve their business performance, an important element of their efforts will be in the burgeoning capability of social analytics… 1. Social media has become the primary creative channel for new information. 2. Business intelligence must look at the whole ecosystem. 3. New techniques are required for social analytics as well as to handle the volumes of big data that result. – While the field is somewhat new, as social analytics has only had a real run-up the last two years, some obvious strategies have started to emerge. For now, most organizations will be trying to build basic social BI capabilities and get experience with them…
There are other ways to apply social BI but these will be the most common ones for the majority of companies building or acquiring such capabilities.”
Camargo: “Creating successful online communities is still more art than science, yet techniques and frameworks are now emerging to turn social business into a real discipline. This week we take a look at a new case study that explores metrics that can measure the intrinsic health of communities instead of looking purely at size as the defining barometer. … Conventional wisdom tells us Community Owners should rely on two key metrics to track the success of an online community: Membership (number of registered users) and participation (number of active users in a given time period). That’s well and good but what about measuring the health of the community, not just its size? … Each and every community out there will have its own particular intricacies and you organization will surely require you to adhere to its own KPIs and reporting frameworks. In our case, the content contribution pyramid-inspired reporting model was a very valuable addition to our reporting toolbox. This KPI enabled us to understand variations in context, purpose and participants within each of our communities while keeping an eye on overall growth trends.”
Hinchcliffe: “When we look back at the first decade of the 21st century, it will be obvious that a few momentous changes in the business and computing landscape occurred. Of these, one of the most profound has been a decreasing emphasis on systems of record and the move towards what are called systems of engagement. … Systems of record have matured to the point where there’s only a little strategic advantage to having your own unique capability. Instead, the discussion on strategic technology has shifted to the other 40% of what businesses in industrialized nations do: Knowledge work. … Thus, using technology to enable knowledge work as a strategic capability has sparked a growing interest in improving what are increasingly known as systems of engagement. … For enterprises, ground zero for the transition to systems of engagement in many companies often centers around any pending update of the corporate intranet. … What’s also clear about the changes taking place in businesses today is that systems of record are not going away. … New systems of engagement are now receiving considerable attention in the forms of online communities, crowdsourcing, Social CRM, open APIs, and many other means as a way to connect customers and business partners together to achieve useful outcomes with the most cost-effectiveness and largest result.“
Google Plus‘ identity crises led to #PlusGate and escalated to a war for pseudonymity: #NymWars; http://eicker.at/NymWars
Guardian: “Google Plus forces us to discuss identity – Google’s Real Name policy embodies a theory that states the way to maximise civility is to abolish anonymity. … Google Plus’s controversial identity policy requires all users to use their ‘real names’. … [P]roblems include the absurdity of Google’s demand for scans of government ID to accomplish this task and the fractal implausibility of Google being able to discern real from fake in all forms of government ID. … The first duty of social software is to improve its users’ social experience. Facebook’s longstanding demand that its users should only have one identity is either a toweringly arrogant willingness to harm people’s social experience in service to doctrine; or it is a miniature figleaf covering a huge, throbbing passion for making it easier to sell our identities to advertisers. – Google has adopted the Facebook doctrine… There could be no stupider moment for Google to subscribe to the gospel of Zuckerberg, and there is no better time for Google to show us an alternative.”
Gizmodo: “Google, Facebook and Twitter now all have similar products. But Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (somewhat inadvertently) made it clear yesterday that while all three have social networking features and make money from ads, they are in fundamentally different businesses. – At a very basic level, Google+ and Facebook are in the identity delivery business, and Twitter is in the information delivery business. That’s a powerful distinction. It reflects a fundamentally different conception of what’s more valuable: information or identity. It also gets at who is more valuable, advertisers or users. – Google and Facebook’s social products are committed to a real names policy. Both can serve someone up to a network of peers or advertisers with some degree of certainty about identity. – Twitter takes exactly the opposite route towards building a network. You can be anonymous, or use a pseudonym, or even impersonate someone else (as long as you indicate that it’s a parody). It will still connect you to others on its network, and allow you to both serve and receive data. And that’s working well, for everybody.”
SEW: “There has been a lot of speculation about why the push for real names on Facebook and now Google, with Google taking a much harder line than even Facebook, not allowing for even the simplest derivation of ‘nyms’ (pseudonyms). … Why is a company like Google taking such a hard line on something as simple as a name – even though there is no verification process for the ‘real name,’ so ultimately this policing is currently meaningless. … Google’s ambitions for Google+ appear to go far beyond social signals, marketing, and their efforts to make a better product. Dig a little further and you’ll find something called the ‘National Strategy For Trusted Identities In Cyberspace‘ (NSTIC). … A way to establish identity was never invented, so one needs to be. The difference is that companies will hold the real IDs, rather than the government – companies with ‘identity services,’ such as Google. … Maybe we have a new wrinkle in the reason behind the real ID movement, not the betterment of services for Google, but the government initiative into a real online ID system. … Real ID systems should be of concern to anyone who believes in the Bill of Rights and our freedom of speech and to not incriminate ourselves – to live a life that isn’t monitored by entities, ‘private’ or not. Is Google part of this? You have to be the judge.”
Boyle: “Thoughts on rel=author, #nymwars, ‘identity service’ – Over the past month or so, the ‘nymwars’ have become the thing Google+ is most known for among my circle of friends. This is a problem of Google’s own making: they are suspending profiles based on naive heuristics about ‘real names’ (actually typical two part western names), and demanding government ID to reinstate them. … This is not an effective defence against trolls as was initially claimed; they’re more concerned with ideas about G+ as an ‘identity service’ and a way to ‘improve our products’ than about the wishes of their users or the fact that they’re perpetuating the exclusion of minorities. … I recommend linking together your profile pages on other sites, rather than only linking everything to your Google profile. … [D]on’t just do what’s on the left here, because all those associations will be lost when your G+ profile is taken down. If you do something more like what’s on the right, other identity services / social networks and other search engines will have a better chance of presenting what you want them to present.”
Gartner, Blakley: “Google+ Can Be A Social Network Or The Name Police – Not Both – Google is currently trying to enforce a ‘common name’ policy in Google+. The gist of the policy is that ‘your Google+ name must be ‘THE’ name by which you are commonly known’. – This policy is insane. I really mean insane; the policy is simply completely divorced from the reality of how names really work AND the reality of how humans really work, and it’s also completely at odds with what Google is trying to achieve with G+. … A name is not an attribute of a person; it is an identifier of a person, chosen arbitrarily and changeable at will. … Google+’s naming policy isn’t failing because it’s poorly implemented, or because Google’s enforcement team is stupid. It’s failing because what they’re trying to do is (1) impossible, and (2) antisocial. … Google’s intention in moving into social networking is to sell ads, Google+’s common names policy gives them a lock on the North American suburban middle-aged conservative white male demographic. w00t.”
Botgirl: “Ejecting virtually identified people with active social networks shows that Google sees online relationships as illegitimate. When Google ejects you for using virtual identity it not only disrespects your privacy choice, but also the choices of everyone who circles you. Shunning the pseudonymous makes intolerance a community standard. – Today, most of the privacy we relinquish is volitional. But If we lose the Nymwars we all become permanent residents in a global Big Brother reality house. The expression of identity is multidimensional, aspects emerging and submerging in a fluid dance with the changing environment. … It’s ironic that those calling for authenticity want to make all the world a stage and cast us all as full-time unpaid actors.”
GigaOM: “Can gamification help solve the online anonymity problem? – There’s been a lot written recently about the issue of online anonymity, and in particular how Google believes that a ‘real names’ policy is necessary so that the Google+ network maintains a certain tone and level of trust. … It’s not so much that badges or other rewards – Slashdot, a pioneering geek community, has long used ‘karma points’ as a way of rewarding users and selecting moderators – cure bad behavior, or prevent trolls from coming to a site. What they do instead is make it easier to distinguish between what Slashdot calls ‘anonymous cowards’ and those who have gained the trust of the community. Over time, it becomes obvious (theoretically) who is worth listening to and who isn’t… Instead of simply trying to ban or exclude anyone who doesn’t want to use a real name, as Google is doing with Google+, why not try to design a system that rewards the type of behavior you want to see, and lets the users of that community decide who they wish to pay attention to?“
Gartner: The market for Social CRM [SCRM] is on pace to surpass $1B in revenue by year-end 2012; http://eicker.at/SCRM
Wikipedia: “Social CRM is use of social media services, techniques and technology to enable organisations to engage with their customers. As an emerging discipline, interpretations of Social CRM vary, but the most frequently quoted definition is from Paul Greenberg: ‘Social CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.‘ – Social CRM is often used as a synonym for Social Media Monitoring, where organisations watch services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for relevant mentions of their product and brand and react accordingly. However, this is too narrow an interpretation, as Social CRM also includes customer communities managed by the organisation themselves.”
Greenberg: “What this means is that SCRM is an extension of CRM, not a replacement for CRM. Its a dramatic change in what it adds to the features, functions and characteristics of CRM but it is still based on the time honored principle that a business needs its customers and prefers them profitable and that same business needs to run itself effectively too. – The transformation that’s sparked the need for Social CRM seems to have occurred in 2004. It has been a social revolution in how we communicate, not a revolution in how we do business per se. All institutions that humans interact with have been affected by things like the cellphone/smartphone, the new social web tools and the instant availability of information in an aggregated and organized way that provides intelligence to the person on the street, not just the enterprise.”
Gartner: “The worldwide social customer relationship management (CRM) market is forecast to reach over $1 billion in revenue by year-end 2012, up from approximately $625 million in 2010… Worldwide social CRM is projected to total $820 million in 2011. … Until recently, many companies have treated social CRM as a series of experiments and tactical purchases. Few have a social CRM strategy or established metrics to measure its effect on hard business results. Different departments, employees and managers implement different types of applications for different purposes… The need for integration will favor more-traditional CRM vendors that add social capabilities. Integration did not matter much when enterprises were just experimenting with social CRM… [C]ompanies are asking for the integration of social data with other customer data within sales, marketing and customer service processes, which will require the integration of social CRM with applications such as a knowledgebase for customer service, multichannel campaign management, sales force automation or e-commerce, Web content and Web analytic applications, master data management, and even back-office applications.”
TC: “While the market is clearly competitive, Gartner says that certain factors can help differentiate Social CRM offerings, including interoperation between public social networks and internal collaborative communities, integration with established CRM products, analytics and more. – There’s no doubt that there is growth in the social enterprise in general. And there’s a lot of movement already taking place in the space. Jive just filed for a $100 million IPO, and Salesforce is making big bets on the space with Chatter.”
Swartz: What does Google mean by “evil“? http://eicker.at/Evil – And a mentionable reply by Cutts: http://eicker.at/NoOne
Does only written knowledge count? Wikipedia and the rules of citation and verification; http://eicker.at/WikipediaCitations
Case study: Accenture‘s social adoption driven by gamification; http://eicker.at/AccentureGamification (via @tailorable)
Kaplan: Let’s introduce an element of play to make the office more engaging; http://eicker.at/OfficeGamification
Google CEO Eric Schmidt surprisingly steps down: Larry Page, in my clear opinion, is ready to lead; http://eicker.at/LarryPage
Schmidt: “For the last 10 years, we have all been equally involved in making decisions. This triumvirate approach has real benefits in terms of shared wisdom, and we will continue to discuss the big decisions among the three of us. But we have also agreed to clarify our individual roles so there’s clear responsibility and accountability at the top of the company. – Larry will now lead product development and technology strategy, his greatest strengths, and starting from April 4 he will take charge of our day-to-day operations as Google’s Chief Executive Officer. In this new role I know he will merge Google’s technology and business vision brilliantly. I am enormously proud of my last decade as CEO, and I am certain that the next 10 years under Larry will be even better! Larry, in my clear opinion, is ready to lead.”
GigaOM: “Larry Page is taking the helm at what could be a turning point for Google. Its core business is under fire; it’s losing ground to Facebook in an important new market; and it’s still relying on search-related ads – a market getting long in the tooth – for 90 percent of its income. It has been unable to build any substantial new businesses, despite a number of attempts, including its recently rebuffed $6-billion acquisition offer for Groupon. As angel investor Chris Dixon put it, some Google watchers are probably asking: Is Page’s return like Steve Jobs coming back to Apple in 1997, or is it more like Jerry Yang’s return to Yahoo in 2007?”
Battelle: “It’s quite interesting that Google did not look outside its ranks for a new CEO, instead doubling down on one of its original founders. I think it’s fair to say that Larry Page will not be a conventional CEO – he’s not been much of a public figure for the past ten years – Sergey is the more gregarious and press friendly of the two. It will be interesting to see if that changes, or if Page chafes at the relentless public demands of running a massively scrutinized public company.”
Salon: “Can Page lead this company? Clearly Schmidt believes so, and so does the board of directors. Investors in after-hours trading boosted the stock price, but whether that had more to do with Google’s blockbuster earnings report today remains to be seen. It has to be somewhat unsettling for investors to see any change of this magnitude. … Brin won’t be lounging around. He’s always seemed the more visionary member of the team, and maybe his change in role will give him more time to think strategically. … It will be Larry Page, more than anyone else, who decides whether the company’s best days are ahead.”
Siegler/TC: “Eric Schmidt: ‘After discussions, we decided to change things. We’ve been doing it one way, but we think this way will be better. Larry will run things day-to-day, I’ll be elevated. And Sergey will do what he does best.’ – Larry Page: ‘I want to congratulate Eric. He’s done a great job this past decade. We’re all in great debt to him. The results speak for themselves. No one in the universe could have done what he’s done. I’ve learned so much from him. His role going forward will be invaluable. This is an incredible oppotunity. People thought when we started that we were too late. Too many other search engine, etc. We’re only at the beginning now.’ – Sergey Brin: ‘I’d like to mention that I’ve had a great time working with Larry now for 15 years and Eric for a decade. Both of them have inspired and moved me. I would like to work more on my personal passions. There will be several new products I’m working on. I’ve been accused of vaporware recently, so I won’t talk about them yet. But soon.'”
Arrington/TC: “Late last summer we were ready to break a big story – that Eric Schmidt would be stepping down as the CEO of Google. Multiple sources and all that jazz. The basic story was that he was tired (who wouldn’t be), and that the idea of competing, and probably losing battles, against Apple and Facebook for the next decade wasn’t all that appealing. Who would replace him? That was the rest of the article. – But Google insisted the story wasn’t accurate, wasn’t even close to accurate, and generally contained no accuracy whatsoever. We killed the story, since their denials seemed fairly straightforward and honest, and we found no other independent sources.
Gerrit Eicker 08:44 on 8. December 2011 Permalink |
Diaspora: “The past few weeks have been pretty crazy for us here at Diaspora*. It is unbelievably painful to lose such a close friend and collaborator as Ilya, and we want to thank our countless community members, friends, family, and professional contacts for all of your support as we try to take care of ourselves and plot a course for Diaspora*’s future. We are forever grateful to the amazing community of people who have stepped up to help us get things back in order. – Of course, the next logical question is, ‘where do we go from here?‘ After long discussions with each other, people close to us, and members of the Diaspora* community, we have come up with a plan to get our beta out the door by early 2012. … Currently Diaspora* Inc. consists of Daniel and Maxwell as full-time team members, plus Raphael and our former NYU advisor Evan Korth on our board. We are incorporated as a for-profit C corporation, and we are a mission-driven company first and foremost… Over the coming months, team expansion is one of our top priorities. We are currently looking for interns, and will be hiring full time developers and a community manager next. Interested in working with us? Check out our internship postings… We are working on ways to generate additional funds to give us the bandwidth to hire more developers, further engage the community, and match the rapid development of closed networks. We will keep the community posted as this process evolves. – We can assure you that any funding solution we go for will never betray the trust you have placed with us, and our ongoing vision of privacy, openness, and ownership of your data. This vision is why we started building Diaspora*, and it is still our number one commitment. … Diaspora*’s mission as a company is to build tools to help people get control of their data and do fun things with it online. It’s about giving users ownership and control over what they share, and creating amazing things. … This was our vision when we launched our Kickstarter campaign in April 2010, and it remains our vision today.“