Release early and often.
Get eyeballs, then monetize.
Bootstrap.
Get basic version working, then add features.
Get basic version working, then scale.
Get basic version working, then license the technology.
Get basic version working, then sell to enterprises.
Get free version working, then upgrade them to premium.
Get free version working, then sell support.
Get free version working, then sell services.
Get free version working, then put it on your resume.
Raise money, hire wisely.
Be first to market.
Be second to market.
Wait for market to clear, then enter with second wave.
Find your niche.
Have the lowest price.
Have the highest price.
Use technology as a barrier to competition.
Win a business plan competition.
Get into an incubator.
Get into a seed accelerator.
Find an angel.
Find a mentor.
Crowd source fund raising.
Get press to raise money.
Raise money to get press.
I think I'll just fall back on the only thing I know:
He doesn't make a very compelling case for this being irresponsible journalism. Maybe it's mediocre journalism but I don't see any attempt to misrepresent the situation. The take-away is smaller companies/projects will try to challenge Facebook. That's it. Is that irresponsible? It seems to be a completely accurate mainstream sort of way to look at things for an audience that doesn't care about the nitty gritty details as much.
Dave winer needs to build his open source Twitter thing already. He's capable of it and can get the press. He mentions it everyday but hasn't done it. Dave, just fucking do it.
Don't tell Dave to just fucking do anything. You're violating his "I only hear people who speak to me in certain tones" policy. You're harshing his mellow, man.
They're on the right track, but they need to make it 100% compatible with the Twitter API, not just 95%. Client developers must be able to simply replace "twitter.com" with some other endpoint and have everything work.
This would allow all the client developers (who now suddenly find themselves competing with Twitter Inc) to immediately rally their users to a new social graph.
Yeah, that was a really curious choice considering that Odeo is now only notorious for being the startup that Ev Williams et al. abandoned (even refunding investors' money) to start Twitter. It's sort of like mentioning that Harrison Ford had an unremarkable carpentry career.
Well this is what I find bizarre. People are throwing money at them, when they haven't even shown that they have a good idea of what they're doing, while existing projects struggle along.
Right. There are a lot of people who are all talk and no code. I would think that someone would ask to see something as proof of concept before doling out money and publicity.
If anything, they might have wasted their 5 minutes of fame by having absolutely no way to reach out to potential users. In a social network, mass is critical, and they don't even have a "sign up for the beta when we eventually release something" page.
Now, they will know the terror and thrill of having the entire Internet watching them and waiting for the collective ROI. This is a powerful motivator.
Any competitor against Facebook is going to need some money, good press, and a strong initial user base. These guys have those; unless they really biff the code, they're at the front of the pack now.
Who cares? This is what the Times frequently does - these types of articles are less about finding something actually currently-breaking-ground rather than the NYT appearing to be hip to the latest trend.
I would say there written on interest, some startups that are going well probably aren't as interesting as this. Mainstream press has always been about what will draw the interest of the most readers, everyone knows facebook and anyone reading tech at all would have heard about the privacy concerns of late.
We could really use a great open source Twitter client
Nitpicking a little, but he probably doesn't mean "client" here. And I think the need for an open source, distributed Facebook is greater than for Twitter, considering the relative amounts of influence and information the two services wield.
Actually, he clarifies in the comments that he really does mean a "client" and not Status.net (what Laconica is called these days). But, there are definitely quite a few out there. Gwibber, Spaz, Canary, etc, etc.
Gwibber is an open-source microblogging client for Linux, and it supports Twitter. Worth mentioning even though Linux isn't mainstream. I'm sure a lot of HN readers are on Linux though.
I thought about working in this problem space. Maybe I should think about it again, and receive wads of money as a result. Except I'm not that young, or working in Ruby on Rails so I won't just get handed money before producing any working code. Even then, there are plenty of one-man projects with working code up on google code, codeplex, github etc. that get nothing at all.
When I last thought about it, I became convinced that we don't need a single implementation, we need standards for multiple implementations to interact. Stuff like RSS, OpenId, OAuth, etc. It's a lot less glamorous to work to these, and to try to push them forward, but it's a lot more useful.
The real problem with a crowdsourced startup is that there's less room to pivot to a new product or business model once it becomes clear the original plan's not going to work.
VCs are happy when startups pivot as long as they get a big payout. Folks who donate to an open federated Facebook aren't going to be nearly as supportive of major shifts in focus.
You have no obligation to them though, most are donating small amounts of money to support while knowing the realistically the dream may never become a reality.
I don't know if I'm understanding their concept , they basically want to store locally (users computers) every data ?
If so, how would this work ? A special app ? A plugin on FF to connect to it ? Will it store your friends data as well ? What if your HD drops dead or something ?
This is the crux of the matter. You've got two options: store your data locally, or store it in the cloud.
Local storage minimizes the chance of loss; Cloud storage sacrifices you privacy. Pick your poison. It comes down to what you're more afraid of, and I am much more afraid of losing pictures than being subject to some sort of privacy violation.
Not saying one is better than the other, but if you sampled 1000 random people, my money says that people err on the side of keeping their pictures safe.
The cloud can be private; you just need a good contract like this one:
Each of us agrees not to use the other's Confidential Information except in connection with the performance or use of the Services, as applicable, the exercise of our respective legal rights under the Agreement, or as may be required by law. Each of us agrees not to disclose the other's Confidential Information to any third person except as follows:
to our respective service providers, agents, and representatives, provided that such service providers, agents, or representatives agree to confidentiality measures that are at least as stringent as those stated in these General Terms and Conditions.
to law enforcement or government agency if required by a subpoena or other compulsory legal process, or if either of us believes, in good faith, that the other's conduct may violate applicable criminal law as required by law; or
in response to a subpoena or other compulsory legal process, provided that each of us agrees to give the other written notice of at least seven days prior to disclosing Confidential Information under this subsection (or prompt notice in advance of disclosure, if seven days advance notice is not reasonably feasible), unless the law forbids such notice.
Well, I can see the reason why. I just don't think they will pull this off. I'm thinking that for every profile, there will be a node(computer), so for instance, if a computer is not connected, will it not be available for viewing that users photos,etc..
But, if they save all of the content (personal info, friends info, pictures...) locally like say a repository(GIT, SVN, etc..) wouldn't this miss the whole point of owning your data, since instead of my picture being in one server..it's living in all of my friends computers.
I would go for the cloud storage because it makes it easier to switch to a new computer. Unless the system is design to transfer data from my local computer to my new one easily it might not be worth the privacy gain. This problem of moving your locally stored data to another computer might be compounded if you are switching operating system as well as computers.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see how they work around it.
false choice. If you allow arbitrary user controlled locations, users can keep their data, for example, on a friends vps (which hopefully is on mirrored disk and backed up to another provider) and get a reasonable degree of reliability without sacraficing privacy.
And there is a third -- those who criticize without doing a tiny bit of fact-checking first.
Either on his own or with others, Dave Winer has created a lot of the tools we take for granted for today. Outliners, RSS, OPML, podcasting, roll-your-own blogging tools, etc.
I don't know him personally, but I've been reading his blog and DaveNets for over 10 years. Go back and do some digging and you'll find he's the real deal.
Regardless of what you feel about him personally, his point is valid. There are plenty of other efforts out there to create a forked version of Facebook (and Twitter, for that matter). Why puff up some guys who haven't actually written any code yet? Most folks would call that what it actually is -- vaporware.
