What's bizarre about the Kickstarter model is that for the most successful projects they end up acting as a blocker — if you reach your goal in a few days and you set your deadline to a month away, there's no way for you to get the funds until it passes — even afterwards it'll take a while for Amazon to let you cash out.
There's no way for the creator to say 'we passed the goal, that's enough money, lets get to work' — something that set Diaspora up for a far more epic failure.
we actually did a kickstarter project for our startup @ http://gorankem.com in august 2009 when kickstarter was still pretty young themselves.
we had no clue how it would turn out so we set our threshold at $1,000 to be raised over 30 days. Before we knew it, we had hit our goal in under a week. unfortunately, it became a lot tougher to justify soliciting donations once our goal had been met.
in hindsight, i wish we had set our initial goal higher, but at the same time, the kickstarter search in fall '09 didn't exactly net us any donations outside of our network of supporters.
It was clear from the beginning that Diaspora would have problems — they were a handful of NYU students just learning to program who'd never shipped anything before, starting from scratch on a white-elephant project that several other groups had been working for years on. When they were forced by their schedule to release something a month ago it had more fundamental security vulnerabilities than features!
Had they not taken donations none of would have cared that they'd released a totally unviable social network Rails app licensed under the AGPL. Kickstarter did them a great disservice by raising $200,000 instead of their goal of $10,000 and swamping them with the publicity to match. The expectations were far higher than they could possibly meet.
Kickstarter sure got a lot of marketing out of it though (and a $10,000 fee)
I don't think this is a problem with kickstarter, I actually think this shows the power of kickstarter! The problem is with diaspora itself, you touched on it there: "they were a handful of NYU students just learning to program who'd never shipped anything before" and it's they who chose kickstarter.
Really though, if they had that kind of funding they could have afforded some serious mentoring, code review, reality checks, etc. I think the problem was/is their schedule and inexperience rather than the funding and publicity.
Note: Kickstarter is not a forum for investment. You don't get equity in return. In this case you are really just pre-ordering one of those stands.