Hands-on: a first look at Diaspora's private alpha test (ars technica) [LWN.net]

Ars technica takes a peek at an early test release of the social networking project, Diaspora "The core functionality of Diaspora right now revolves around posting short text messages and photos. You can "reshare" and comment on individual messages. You can select an aspect from the tab bar at the top of the site in order to post a message that will be visible to only the people in that aspect. You can also post from the "Home" tab to send a message to all of your aspects. When you send a global message, you can also optionally choose to make it public, which will cause Diaspora to make it accessible through a public RSS feed and cross-post it to your external social networking accounts on Twitter and Facebook."

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Hands-on: a first look at Diaspora's private alpha test (ars technica)

Posted Nov 29, 2010 20:58 UTC (Mon) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

Nice! Sounds promising, a lot like identi.ca's launch (see miguel's account http://identi.ca/migueldeicaza for his take on it back when it was first launched).

Hopefully, it'll get up and running quickly, a lot like identi.ca did.

Hands-on: a first look at Diaspora's private alpha test (ars technica)

Posted Nov 30, 2010 2:33 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

> It raises questions about how much of the efficacy of social networking tools is predicated on the willingness of users to compromise their privacy.

My favourite sentence of that article.

Hands-on: a first look at Diaspora's private alpha test (ars technica)

Posted Nov 30, 2010 7:27 UTC (Tue) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]

It's a good question. But I'd tend to say "not so much".

Being able to see friends-of-friends and in particular auto-suggestions based on mutual friendship does help a lot in making it quicker to build a social network. If 4 of your friends know Anne, the odds are fairly high that you also do.

But Diaspora isn't about hiding all your information. It's about giving you *control* over your information. Thus I'd expect you to be able to choose which aspects are allowed to see your list of friends, and I'd expect the default for this to not randomly change in the direction of share-more like Facebook has done a dozen times the last 5 years.

In short, I don't see any reason why Diaspora can't let people who want to share, share. Indeed I expect it will. But I expect it'll be sharing or not according to your own choice.

GNU social

Posted Nov 30, 2010 18:10 UTC (Tue) by davi (guest, #18853) [Link]

GNU social is a lot better.

Hands-on: a first look at Diaspora's private alpha test (ars technica)

Posted Dec 2, 2010 23:24 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

Has the gaping security holes been taken care of? Is there anything in the software architecture or development process that indicates there is at least an awareness of these things, let alone making sure it does not happen again?

Please don't take this as inflammatory, but in my opinion this is the most important aspects of the project and the first release was very reassuring to say the least.