After I wrote my last post, I immediately thought « Darn, I’ve forgotten to talk about Diaspora ». Fortunately, nobody has flamed me yet…

So here it is, Diaspora is still in its infancy, and actually is still in closed beta status, but it has already been acclaimed by many as a decent alternative to facebook. However it is hard to believe that it will really strikes – yesterday I stumbled on a post while looking for something about their protocol : they seemingly may have started the project the wrong way, writing the implementation before thinking about an interop protocol. It’s certainly not completely bad. Writing an implementation of a protocol is a mandatory step to find its weaknesses. From a company point of view, actually, this is quite a good approach. Designing a protocol is a cumbersome and expensive thing to do. If interoperability and openness is not your primary goal, then the Diaspora way is probably the fastest way. Going fast is not the best way to go far, though…