Good point. The other things that stood out for me:
- They talked about technical stuff that they were doing (which is fine if you are a HN-type) but for ordinary people who use Facebook there is no reason to care or even figure out who Diaspora are. Network effects are really strong as others have noted. Facebook offered exclusivity to Ivy League colleges when they launched, Diaspora need to really figure out their angle. Perhaps appeal to the Quora/HN/TED Conference/SXSW type crowd first, and create the illusion of scarcity and exclusivity that way?
- They seem to have no compelling reason to switch to Diaspora that users really care about. If they offered, I don't know, an integrated Skype interface (unlikely perhaps now), proper privacy, and a way to migrate your Facebook data to their service (highly unlikely), perhaps people would sit up and take notice. (Just throwing random silly ideas out there.)
- I think they need to become really aggressive and 'pick a fight' with Facebook. Meekly churning out features on a project on Github isn't going to get you several hundred million users. They need to get serious media coverage, and one would think that they will need to have a significant marketing budget for this.
EDIT: Their approach seems to be the opposite of the 'release early and pump out features' approach that allows YC companies to take off quickly. Not good.
- They talked about technical stuff that they were doing (which is fine if you are a HN-type) but for ordinary people who use Facebook there is no reason to care or even figure out who Diaspora are. Network effects are really strong as others have noted. Facebook offered exclusivity to Ivy League colleges when they launched, Diaspora need to really figure out their angle. Perhaps appeal to the Quora/HN/TED Conference/SXSW type crowd first, and create the illusion of scarcity and exclusivity that way?
- They seem to have no compelling reason to switch to Diaspora that users really care about. If they offered, I don't know, an integrated Skype interface (unlikely perhaps now), proper privacy, and a way to migrate your Facebook data to their service (highly unlikely), perhaps people would sit up and take notice. (Just throwing random silly ideas out there.)
- I think they need to become really aggressive and 'pick a fight' with Facebook. Meekly churning out features on a project on Github isn't going to get you several hundred million users. They need to get serious media coverage, and one would think that they will need to have a significant marketing budget for this.
EDIT: Their approach seems to be the opposite of the 'release early and pump out features' approach that allows YC companies to take off quickly. Not good.
http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html