james mckay dot net

I was hoping that Diaspora would prove to be a Facebook killer, but somehow, I don’t think that’s going to happen. Their choice of technology stack — Ruby on Rails with a MongoDB back-end — has seen to that.

Rails is something of a darling among geeks, and it is great for web applications that you only install on your own servers. So too are the plethora of NoSQL databases that seem to be all the rage among that kind of crowd these days. However, they are totally unsuitable for distribution to the general public.

Why? Simply because most cheap’n’nasty web hosts do not support them.

This is something that the WordPress core developers understood. Their decision to continue supporting PHP 4 long after its end of life brought howls of derision from WordPress plugin developers everywhere, but they were thinking first and foremost about their users — people with only limited computer skills who would deploy WordPress on their own shared hosting accounts. They wanted to get the widest possible audience.

Diaspora should be targetting run-of-the-mill Facebook users, not geeks. If it had been written in PHP with a MySQL back end, it would be more likely to see widespread adoption. However, by opting for Ruby on Rails, they’ve placed a barrier to adoption in front of the kind of technically-capable-but-not-particularly-geeky users on a tight budget who would otherwise set up Diaspora seeds for local schools, churches, clubs and so on. They risk turning it into a geek ghetto.

Sigh. Perhaps I’ll just have to put up with Faceborg after all.

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Posted at 08:00 on 17 September 2010.
Tagged: Diaspora, Facebook, PHP, Rails

So I finally succumbed to pressure from my friends and colleagues and got myself onto Facebook. This may come as a bit of a surprise given my rather low opinion of MySpace, but then again, while there are similarities, Facebook is not MySpace.

What is the difference? Two things. One is aesthetics. There are none of these awful seizure-inducing profile pages with illegibly tiny pink text on an orange background, and no annoying background music, and in their place is a slick, clean, responsive, easy to use Ajax driven interface.

The second — and much more important — thing: developers, developers, developers. MySpace has hitherto had something of a reputation for sending in the legal heavies after people who write widgets and add-ons for the platform. Facebook is the exact opposite, and positively encourages it, having released a complete API with full instructions on how to make a Facebook application.

This makes it the Swiss Army Knife of social networking websites, since there is so much that you can do with the platform. You can integrate Facebook with a whole lot of other services such as your own WordPress blog (my own blog posts get reproduced on my Facebook profile via the RSS feed) or even Wikipedia if you are that way inclined. A particularly useful application that has recently been launched is Google Reader Shared Items, which allows you to share interesting items in your RSS feeds with your friends very easily. Scoble loves it.

I think sites such as Facebook are also well placed to supplant e-mail as the primary one-to-one communication means of the Internet. Because you set up a network of friends, there is an element of trust there that makes it much easier to filter out spam, phishing and viruses. Of course, these nefarious characters tend to be a pretty crafty bunch, so vigilance is still necessary, but since there is an identifiable element of trust there, it is easier to filter it out or even block it altogether, by setting your profile so that only people you have accepted as friends can contact you through the system.

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Posted at 23:22 on 16 July 2007.
Tagged: Facebook, MySpace, social networking