A few people have asked us how TrustFabric compares to Diaspora. Here are some thoughts.. mostly Joe’s thoughts.

The short attention span the answer is:

It sounds like they are planning to build what we built 3 months ago.

“judge results not intentions” — A little Tom Peters gem which has stuck with me over the years.

The longer version:

There have been a few reality check posts about Diaspora.

I’ll start with the positive stuff:

• Diaspora has the right idea. Distributed and Open makes sense. I think the way social networks are “owned” and live in a centrally hosted environment has bugged most geeks for some time now. We should own and control our information.
• They have the right model. Seeds. We call them Agents. Many people have a distributed social network in the browser idea. Bad idea, I have more than one browser and I don’t want to worry about a very complex thing (my browser) being exploited. I don’t want to keep all my personal information in it.
• They are doing it the right way. Open Source. AGPL.

The list goes on. TrustFabric and Diaspora are pretty similar here. I’m ignoring the little Python vs Ruby kind of details.

Next, some challenges:

• Expectations. I think there is a HUGE disconnect between what people expect from Diaspora and what they are planning to build. People think, new Facebook (pretty things). Diaspora seems to be saying.. open distributed Framework (geeky things). Geeks like to build API’s and frameworks, they don’t like to build the things which users expect a new Facebook to do. Photo tagging and pretty interfaces is not the same as moving GPG messages around with REST.
• Is it sustainable? If people give you money they usually think they are getting something for their money. You generally get one shot. Most projects (and businesses) take about 3 years to gather enough momentum to be self sustaining. I wonder about the longer term plan. Maybe some form of business model would be useful.
• Adoption. How do you get people to us it? Diaspora (when the code exists) is far from the only open distributed social framework out there. Have a look at foaf+ssl for example. Are people using it? Are people using something as simple as OpenID? Do they have a reason to?
• By the Geeks for the Geeks. Is building an open (source) social network the same problem as writing open source software? I don’t think so. You can hack up your own uber fast new web server, just for fun, just because it’s useful to you on day 1. You can share the code and see if others find it useful. It’s a scratch my own itch model. Social networks don’t work like this.. it’s about the network effect, their value is in the number of users. It’s more of a popularity contest model.

I’d like to think TrustFabric is a bit more mature on the points above. We’ve been busy designing this thing since early 2009 and a lot of the thinking comes from even earlier. We have running code and users. We have a practical application and a fairly long list of interested customers. Also, we’ve had a number of discussions with people who want to see a business model and a solution for the adoption problem before they invest money. We’ve had some practise at answering the tough questions.

Make no mistake there is a wave out there. The Open and Distributed wave. We don’t have all the answers, but we have some ideas on how to ride this wave.

We’re giving a (technical) CLUG talk on 25 May (today). If you can code or if you have a brilliant use for TrustFabric, please attend and get involved.