I've had high hopes for Diaspora. Gave them cash when they were on Kickstarter. Tried hosting my own Diaspora server. Waited for the devs and the community to do something with the $200,000 they raised.

Certainly a lot of hackers have done much more with much less.

In the year since Diaspora was announced, though, not much has happened.

Ask anyone in the general public if they've used Diaspora, and you're more likely to get a confused "what's Diaspora?"

At the end of the day, there's really only one measuring stick for a social service: users. We use social sites to communicate with our friends and followers. Facebook is deeply flawed, but people have stayed there because people were staying there.

G+ looks like the first real opportunity for people to leave Facebook without losing the connections they've become addicted to. If G+ is going to be the new default for sharing online, I really just want three things.

1. Let me control my data and my privacy.

2. Play nice with other sites, protocols, and standards.

3. Provide a great user experience, including "borrowing" from other places when it makes sense.

According to Wikipedia, Diaspora was initially funded in April 2010 and a developer preview was released in September 2010. The Google slide deck was published in July 2010, so presumably this is an idea they had been kicking around for a while before then.

It seems that the notion of friend (circles|aspects) is just one of those obvious ideas that everybody had, but nobody executed properly until now.

Blatant copying looks more like the Plurk v. Microsoft situation from December 2009: http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/14/microsoft-plurk-ripoff/.

Pixel for pixel copying = lame, feature overlap = necessary.

How complete is the export is exactly?

I think "circles" as in "circles of friends" would be intuitive to most users. Probably because the concept corresponds to how people already organise their social groups anyway.

An "aspect" on the other hand focuses not on the who, but on how you present your self. I think this would be much more obscure for most users to get used to even though the end effect is basically the same.

I have immense respect for the founders of the diaspora project. they were at the right place and at the right time to get some kickass funding and publicity, but thats basically it. don't get me wrong. the idea is great, and I'd love to see a proper competitor to facebook from the community.

and I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this.

If you try to solve group communication problems, you by definition need to create some model of groups, be it Circles, Diaspora aspects, Facebook groups, IRC channels, email recipient lists, whatever.

Because both Diaspora and Google+ are clearly inspired by semi-public sharing model of Facebook, it's quite natural that their group model will resemble each other, even be almost identical. If, on the otherhand, a service is focused around group conversation instead of sharing, it's group model might be one where groups are shared among participants, instead of being private aliases.

However, what's much more interesting to me is how a service tries to bootstrap "the group management".

In the beginning you don't have Circles and you don't have strong incentive to group people to Circles when you don't know are you going to use the service and how are you going to use it. Google clearly tried to make it more enjoyable by providing fun visual UI. But it still feels a chore, because benefits are unclear.

I would have emphasized it differently: start from a sharing experience instead of group management. Use email-like recipient list as the basic model and introduce the fun way to make group aliases after you have shared a few items. It's more utilitarian model, which doesn't have as strong virality factor as Google's approach. In Google+ you get something akin to invite when somebody adds you to his Circle.

Facebook wasn't the first social networking site.

Google wasn't the first search engine.

Windows/Mac/Unix weren't the first operating systems.

Taking ideas from competitors and improving upon them is a fundamental part of business. No one actually thinks that coming up with a product concept is the same as delivering a product that users actually want.

Therefore they are only similar in that they have targeted people's areas of displeasure regarding facebook, and this is hardly remarkable. They were both built specifically to compete with facebook, so this whole discussion is almost tautological.

And at the end of the day, It doesn't matter who was the first. What matters is who will be the first that will do it right.

When was it not in doubt? They got money and momentum during some Facebook privacy blunder that was so ephemeral I can't even remember what it was about.

Lot's of ideas get tried out, some times they stick. Other times they take 2 or 3 starts/failures before they stick

http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...

But still sad that Diaspora might close their doors. They can take pride in the fact that their vision is being adopted.

Anyway, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2714109 for google+ invitations.