After all, Diaspora is a rookie company; its software is buggy and crash prone, and although the company tries to solve the biggest problem with Facebook by giving users better control over their private data, its site looks and acts like a vacant, amateur imitation. They hope that in the process they will help promote standards that other social sites—such as Digg , LinkedIn , Google Buzz , and perhaps one day even Facebook—will use to bridge their services.
They imagine that during the next decade, the Web will evolve from a sea of social networking islands into what many developers are calling the federated social Web —one that lets you choose your networking provider, just as you now choose your e-mail provider, and yet still connect with friends who use other services.
They believe that such a Web is not only possible but also preferable. Of course, Google has a lot to gain if Diaspora can fix social networking. The search giant has tried to stop Facebook from encroaching on its share of online advertising revenue by offering its own networking services, including Lively discontinued , Orkut thriving only in Brazil , Buzz trashed for its privacy flaws , and Wave passed on to Apache. But so far, Google has failed to make anything as wildly popular as Facebook.
As far as the guys know, no prominent Googlers have invested money in Diaspora, but they have written most of their code using Google-engineered protocols. And if they can work out the kinks in their system and turn a profit, says Rob Enderle , an Internet technology analyst and president of the Enderle Group, in San Jose, Calif. Diaspora itself may not be a threat to Facebook. Finally, it is the name of the open-source software that runs the site and that other people are using to run other Diaspora-like websites, known as pods.
Often the spokesman at pitch meetings with venture capitalists, he is the most eloquent and outspoken of the four guys, and the most disheveled. A site run by a Web designer in Germany that tracks the uptime of several pods recently listed 48 of them. They had names like Diasp. Each pod hosts anywhere from one to 15 users.
Sign up with any one of them and the experience is pretty much the same as if you signed up at Joindiaspora.
The guys imagine that someday, once other pod hosts start writing their own software, each one will be very different. Choice, interoperability, and the chance to invent your own networking experience are what federated networks such the Diaspora pods are all about. If I create an account at Joindiaspora. Even the guys know their company could very well be dead within the next six months, once its seed money runs out. Starting a social networking business today without honed programming skills and a clear moneymaking scheme is a big risk.
They first started hanging out together in the fall of as student members of the Association for Computing Machinery. This is bad. It should be obsolete!
We as technologists should fix it! Most important, the software that ran the box would be free and open source, so anyone could download it and tailor it to his or her needs. In the video, they sit shoulder to shoulder in front of a sliding chalkboard, facing the camera. Our virtual lives should work the same way. Two days after that, Zuckerberg announced a newly developed protocol he called Open Graph.
Many Facebook members were outraged that the photos and updates they thought they had shared only with friends were now being handed over to companies. Donations for Diaspora came rolling in. A reporter from The New York Times called and interviewed the guys. Even Mark Zuckerberg pitched in. That day, they caught a plane to California to begin the most ambitious hacker project any of them had ever tackled.
Pivotal Labs occupies the third floor of a drab, gray building sandwiched between a CVS drug store and a fitness club on Market Street in downtown San Francisco. The office is open and airy. There are rows of tables cluttered with big-screen monitors, a couple of Ping-Pong tables, and a kitchen stocked with coffee, cereal, granola bars, fruit in wicker baskets, and Mexican Coca-Cola.
The Diaspora guys sit side by side at one of the tables, surrounded by boxes overflowing with Diaspora T-shirts and paper plates piled with pistachio shells.
When they arrived at Pivotal last June, they knew their project would be less a summer experiment than a full-time job. Their plan was to code all summer, get the false starts and embarrassing oversights out of the way, then release what they had on the code-hosting site GitHub in mid-September.
T hey would license the software under the Affero General Public License AGPL , which would ensure that the Diaspora code remained free to anyone to use and play with and that whoever changed it or added to it had to release the code under AGPL, too.
Today more than people have contributed to the Diaspora project, and the code has been translated into 40 different languages, including Swedish and simplified Chinese.
When at last the guys sat down to type the first lines of code, they knew that several veteran programmers, including some at Google, were already experimenting with many of the protocols needed to build a federated social network. The first thing users of any online social network need to be able to do is meet one another.
On a centralized network such as Facebook, finding new friends is easy. In fact, Facebook often does this for you by recommending people who share your affiliations or who know your friends.
Meeting people on a federated network of many separate servers with many separate databases is trickier. It was developed in by a couple of engineers at Google and modeled after an old Unix protocol called Finger. User Name, such as a phone number and whether the person was logged into the network.
For example, suppose I have an account on the Diaspora-powered pod My-seed. The ability to let users search its database is perhaps the biggest advantage Facebook has over a federated network such as Diaspora and the biggest threat the company poses to Google. Because Facebook encourages its users to list their hobbies, affiliations, likes and dislikes, and tag photos, videos, and events, the site has become a sizable search index. Users can search for everyone who collects Raytheon CK transistors, pull up photos of all of them, and poll other Facebook users about whether they prefer iPhones or Android phones before buying one.
Facebook is awesome because I can search for anyone! Suppose now that I, at me my-seed. Next, I need to be able to communicate with you. As you can imagine, a push system distributes messages more efficiently than a pull system, but it also makes a lot of demands on the server doing the pushing. The protocol, named PubSubHubbub , calls for an intermediary server, or hub, and assigns it the task of handing out updates from a publishing server to its subscribers. Using a cloud-based hub, such as the one Google runs, lets you host data on your own small, cheap server while the hub takes care of publishing your updates for you.
The software run by subscribing Diaspora customers then uses that information to display the updates in an aesthetic, engaging way, much like an RSS or Atom feed reader. For this, the guys adopted a protocol called Salmon , developed by Google engineer John Panzer. The post author then pushes the comment out to his friends. Last 15 September, as planned, the guys made their code public. Zhao is developing a mobile social network architecture called Polaris that, if widely adopted, he says, would assemble existing social networking services into a single federated system.
To be fair, the Diaspora guys are working toward linking up their pod with other networks, starting with StatusNet, which targets businesses and organizations, and Identi. At first, open-source projects such as Diaspora will grow steadily and haphazardly, all the while tweaking their technologies, working out standards, and syncing with each other.
Craig S. China has taken another step toward semiconductor independence with Alibaba announcing the design of a 5-nanometer technology server chip that is based on Arm Ltd. But, impressive as that feat is, an even more significant chip design development by the Chinese tech giant may be making available the source code to a RISC-V CPU core its own engineers designed. This means other companies can use it in their own processor designs—and escape architecture license fees.
The company made both announcements at its annual cloud convention in its home city of Hangzhou last month. The Chinese government is funding a lot of startups that are designing a variety of chips. The number of newly registered Chinese chip-related companies more than tripled in the first five months of from the same period a year ago.
And the biggest Chinese technology companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Huawei are developing their own chips rather than banking on those from Intel, Nvidia, and other United States-based companies. China is intent on developing semiconductor independence, both in design and manufacture of state-of-the-art chips.
The urgency for doing so has been helped along by U. The sanctions extend to any Huawei suppliers that use U. The United States, alarmed at China's campaign to bring Taiwan under its control, has also begun an ambitious program to 'reshore' its semiconductor manufacturing after allowing much of it to migrate to Taiwan.
Around 80 percent of the world's semiconductor production capacity is in Asia, and nearly all the most advanced logic chip production is in Taiwan. No Chinese semiconductor foundry has yet achieved the 5-nanometer processing needed to make Alibaba's new ARM-based chip, so it is still beholden to Taiwan for manufacturing.
But the implications of Alibaba's general choice of Arm and RISC-V instruction set architectures is perhaps more consequential for the long term.
An instruction set architecture, or ISA, is the language in which software talks to hardware, and thus determines the kind of software that can run on a particular chip. One thing we have been able to see now that the feature and Jason's statistics page have been in operation for a few months is that the network continues to grow healthily.
One of the items in our todo-list is to use these statistics and the great work by Jason and David on their sites to provide a list of available pods on our official website, diasporafoundation. You can't wait to see that arriving? Come help us make it on GitHub! Keep in mind when reading these statistics that: Not every pod is listed, as some podmins may choose not to list their pod.
The user stats feature is opt-in, so some pods listed appear to have no users. There is currently a bug fixed in next release v0.
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