Chime.in
UberMedia starts its own social network: Chime.in, a Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Facebook clone; http://eicker.at/Chimein
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Diaspora’s First Year
Diaspora: from 4 to >100K users, from 0 to >7K commits, from alpha to beta soon? http://eicker.at/DiasporasFirstYear
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Gerrit Eicker
Diasporial: “[September 15th] is a very special day for the Diaspora project. It has been exactly one year since the guys released the Diaspora source code! For a year now, people have been able to contribute to this project and set up pods. And so they did! Till date, 7371 commits have been made by the contributors and the four founders. In only a years time, the amount of Diaspora users has grown from 4 to over 100.000, spread over lots of pods! … It is rumoured that Diaspora will hit beta in November, on its Alpha release anniversary.”
Diaspora: “We know that if you’re not a contributor and don’t follow us on Github, it’s hard to see Diaspora grow and evolve. Now that Diaspora is moving into its second year and a new phase of development, here are some numbers on the progress we’ve made. … Our developer community is growing. Diaspora has had over 100 unique code contributors and countless others have edited our wiki and updated Diaspora’s translations in over 51 languages. We have over 4,600 followers and over 840 forks, which means that tons of developers are checking out our code. That makes us the sixth most popular project on GitHub, right behind great open source projects like JQuery, Ruby On Rails, and Node, just to name a few.”
Diaspora: “There’s been big news in the social networking world recently, and we can’t help but be pleased with the impact our work has had on two of the biggest developments. We’re proud that Google+ imitated one of our core features, aspects, with their circles. And now Facebook is at last moving in the right direction with user control over privacy, a move spurred not just by Google+, but more fundamentally by you and tens of thousands of community members, as well as hundreds of thousands of people who’ve lined up to try Diaspora* – that is, by all of us who’ve stood up to say ‘there has to be a better way.’ We’re making a difference already.”
RWW: “There are things about Diaspora that still are unique among its competitors. Not only is it open-source, it’s decentralized and distributed. Users are encouraged to set up their own servers. But these are not features for normal human users. In that category, the social networking superpowers seem to have Diaspora cornered. … Diaspora has been called the anti-Facebook for its strong privacy stance, and it had ‘aspects’ before anyone knew about Google Plus and its circles. … If Google Plus has taught us anything, it’s that normal people don’t feel like leaving the social networks where they already feel settled. … Is there anything Diaspora can do? I think so, but it’s a departure from it’s current incarnation, which is an awful lot like Google Plus (or vice versa, or whatever). It’s unrealistic to expect a mass exodus from one social network that works to another of which no one has ever heard. Diaspora’s potential is in its ability to syndicate to our other services (currently Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr) while still allowing us to own our data. … If Diaspora is built as a publishing platform that lets us own our content and direct it to our existing networks – and especially if we can read from them, too – it would be an awesome, welcome tool that even Dave Winer could love. But if the launch of Google Plus wasn’t splashy enough to start a mass Facebook exodus, a later launch of a service that looks the same is not going to do it.”
TNW: “Diaspora has never pitched itself as direct competitor to the likes of Facebook – more an alternative model for how social networks could be designed. However, it’s gained a reputation from observers as ‘that quirky Facebook alternative that never quite made it.’ Whether there’s a need or desire for its product or not, it seems there’s life in the Diaspora team yet.”
Some ‘historical’ Diaspora posts here on Wir sprechen Online:
- Diaspora rockets on Kickstarter, 15.05.2010
- Diaspora gets funded with $200K, 03.06.2010
- Diaspora’s first month and first progress, 04.07.2010
- Diaspora works! 27.08.2010
- Diaspora Alpha, the developer release, 16.09.2010
- Joindiaspora.com opens its doors in private alpha, 24.11.2010
- Diaspora summary, 20.07.2011
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Gerrit Eicker
Diaspora Summary
IEEE: The making of Diaspora. Four young coders are planting the seeds for the post-Facebook future; http://eicker.at/DiasporaSummary
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Gerrit Eicker
Wikipedia: “Diaspora (stylized DIASPORA*) is a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service, providing a decentralized alternative to social network services like Facebook. The project is currently under development by Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, students at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The group received donations in excess of $200,000 via Kickstarter. A consumer alpha version was released on November 23, 2010. … Diaspora works by letting users set up their own server (or ‘pod’) to host content; pods can then interact to share status updates, photographs, and other social data. It allows its users to host their data with a traditional web host, a cloud based host, an ISP, or a friend. The framework, which is being built on Ruby on Rails, is free software and can be experimented with by external developers.”
IEEE: “Journalists and bloggers have called Diaspora ‘the Facebook killer,’ ‘the Facebook rival,’ ‘the anti-Facebook,’ ‘Facebook’s challenger,’ and ‘another Facebook wannabe.’ … The guys, however, don’t see themselves as competition. … They’re taking a stab at reengineering the way online socializing works by building an entire network of networks from the ground up. They hope that in the process they will help promote standards that other social sites … will use to bridge their services. … Choice, interoperability, and the chance to invent your own networking experience are what federated networks such the Diaspora pods are all about. … They don’t like that Facebook owns the data they share through the site and can mine or sell it to advertisers at will. … Above all, they don’t like that most ordinary people and many Web engineers have come to believe that seven-year-old Facebook represents the be-all and end-all of everything online socializing will ever be. … ‘The problem with Diaspora right now is it’s not designed to work with other providers out of the box,’ says Ben Zhao, a network security expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara [listen to an interview with Zhao].”
Diaspora Wiki: “Diaspora needs you! – Diaspora is an open source project, which means all our code and documentation is available for free to anyone online. It also means that, while there is a core team working on the project full time, it only thrives because we have a wonderful set of volunteer collaborators who help out in their free time. – Some of these volunteers are developers and help with the code, which is the ‘traditional’ way to help out an open source project, and is awesome. But many are not developers, and their contributions are awesome too. … Come talk to us. The best ways to get in touch in realtime are our Convore group, or IRC. Tell us what you’re interested in working on – code, tutorials, feature ideas, mockups, running a pod, helping with the wiki, other – and we can help you figure out how to get going.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus vs. Twitter?
Scoble: Google Plus has made Twitter boring; http://eicker.at/2h vs. Siegler: Twitter is not Google Plus; http://eicker.at/2i
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Gerrit Eicker
Scoble: “For the past few days I’ve been hanging out in Jackson Hole with a bunch of geeks and one thing I’ve noticed over and over is how boring Twitter has gotten when compared to Google+. Why has Twitter turned boring? I’ve found several areas: 1. First experience. 2. Pictures and videos. 3. Control over content distribution. 4. No API, no auto pushing of content. 5. Signals are visible from who you excited and pissed off. 6. Auto flowing webpage. So, let’s take each of these areas on, and talk about what Twitter could do to make users excited again.”
Siegler: “Put more bluntly: if Twitter is batshit crazy enough to implement even half of the things that Scoble lays out, they will effectively kill their own product. … Twitter is not Google+. Nor does it need to be. If they tried to make it into Google+ on the fly, the millions of current users would rightfully throw a shit-fit. I have a feeling that Scoble would too. … The truth is that Twitter almost did kill itself a few years ago also due to scaling issues. But for whatever reason, none of their competitors were able to capitalize and Twitter emerged, stronger. … Twitter’s core concept is the extension of simple, short messages throughout the past many decades. The postcard begat the SMS message begat the IM status message begat Twitter. Sometimes the simplest ideas resonate because of the very fact that they are simple.”
Winer: “Scoble, my longtime friend, and someone whose chutzpah I admire, says that Google-Plus is making Twitter boring. – Yes, I agree – and that’s a good thing. – He says Twitter should evolve to be more like Google, but I disagree. … It isn’t until a technology becomes boring that it becomes truly useful. Because it’s the things people do with tech that are interesting. … Twitter has been interesting for far too long. What they should want now is to be used as an almost invisible, taken-for-granted but indispensible piece of the workings of the Internet. Permanent link to this item in the archive. – It’s way past time for it to be the precocious upstart. It’s used for all kinds of mission-critical communication. Reliability would be a better measure of its success over interestingness.“
Gerrit Eicker
Like!
The Like Log Study: What web content gets most Facebook Likes? Put significant effort in your top stories; http://eicker.at/Like
Gerrit Eicker
Ready to Rumble?
Ready for 2011? Predictions regarding Data, IT, Journalism and Publishing, the Metaverse and Web; http://eicker.at/Predictions
Gerrit Eicker
Journalism: Syndication, Paywalls, eBooks
Niemann Journalism Lab Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011; http://eicker.at/Journalism2011
Gerrit Eicker
RSS: Higher Quality, Better Signal
Battelle on RSS: Higher quality, better signal, but more expensive, used only by folks in the industry; http://eicker.at/RSS
Gerrit Eicker
Twitter Influence
ExactTarget, CoTweet study: The most influential consumers online are on Twitter; http://j.mp/c6s0Rx
Gerrit Eicker
Kiva en Francais
Open source Kiva platform, which can be replicated in other languages: Kiva en Francais; http://j.mp/9FB9qf
Gerrit Eicker 08:28 on 18. October 2011 Permalink |
VB: UberMedia CEO Bill Gross isn’t dodging the fact that his latest app, Chime.in, is a patchwork of other successful apps. – ‘It’s an amalgam of blogging and Reddit and Facebook – there’s aspects of each in there,‘ he told VentureBeat in a phone interview last week. – ‘We’re definitely borrowing those good ideas. But this is a deeper dive into their interests and intelligent conversations around [users’] passions.‘ – The Chime.in site will launch tomorrow, but the app is available now in the iTunes App Store. – As Gross mentioned, it has a lot in common with other social media tools. It gives users and brand-oriented publishers a public, online forum for sharing text and picture updates, just like Twitter. You can also share videos and polls, just like on Facebook.”
TC: “A tipster informs us that UberMedia, the company behind social networking apps like Echofon and UberSocial / Twidroyd, has unintentionally pushed its new iPhone application onto the App Store… This is plausible, because the Chime.in website isn’t accessible yet at the time of writing, although the support pages appear to be live already. – So is Chime.in the oft-rumored challenger to Twitter, which UberMedia has had run-ins with in the past? UberMedia has always denied that it had plans to launch a competing social network, so it’s a question worth asking. And the answer is no, not really. – Chime.in is described on the support pages as an online and mobile network organized around interests, or an ‘interest network’ to keep it brief. Still according to the support pages, Chime.in was ‘was created for people who are active in social media and looking for a way to engage in conversations and more deeply interact with content related to their interests’. … ‘All other social networks are all about connecting with people. Chime.in is about connecting with interests and people – it’s an interest network. It lets you tailor the content you see and search for to the topics you care about, so you aren’t bogged down sorting through posts you aren’t interested in.'”
GigaOM: “Bill Gross wants to take on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ – [H]e is launching a content-focused social network called Chime.in that will compete not just with Google’s new social platform Google+ but with Twitter and Facebook too, and link-sharing sites like Reddit and Digg as well. Does the world need another social platform for sharing content? Gross says that it does, and that his connections with content companies will help Chime.in succeed – but the odds are stacked against him. … Chime.in may not be a direct competitor to Twitter, but it is clearly a shot across the bow. According to the support pages for the service [which have since been taken offline], it will allow users to post to Twitter or Facebook or Google+ as well as to the Chime.in network, and is therefore not competitive but ‘additive to the ecosystem.’ … [T]he biggest hurdle for Chime.in is the simple fact that Facebook now has 800 million users and Twitter has 200 million or so, with Google+ in the 50 million range. Useful features aren’t always enough for a social network to flourish, especially when there is so much competition. In the end, even if you build it they might not come.”
ATD: “Serial entrepreneur Bill Gross’s latest effort is called Chime.in, a social platform for writing about and discussing common interests. What makes it different from other social network and social news sites is that Chime.in wants to pay people for their contributions. … Gross argued that the Chime.in community will police itself against gamers and crappy content – the kind of stuff that’s plagued sites like Digg and content farms like Demand Media – because users won’t recommend Chimes they don’t like. – ‘The breakthrough that’s happened is if you let people have the flexibility to share, they’ll get the message to the right people and do the dirty work for you,’ Gross said.