It may seem strange for us, a relatively small web development company in Australia, to be truly excited about the new social network, Diaspora, that’s being built by “Four nerds with a call to arms”, to paraphrase a NYTimes article about the start up, in New York.
But there are more similarities and more things to like about them, than many other companies right now, and it’s a tribute to the four young men who are building it, to say that they don’t care that their primary competition – Facebook – has over 500 million users.
What we at Valegro particularly like is that they’re addressing a need and providing choice to, quite literally, hundreds of millions of people globally. It is the tenacity, and the fact that they’re going open source, something we’ve advocated companies do for a long time, that really makes us stand up and watch in awe and delight as these individuals try and accomplish something extraordinary.
Diaspora, the name chosen as it is Greek for ‘the scattering of seeds’, is a truly wonderful idea. Their website says “Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy. We call these computers ‘seeds’. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server. Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your facebook profile, tweets, anything. We are designing an easily extendable plugin framework for Diaspora, so that whenever newfangled content gets invented, it will be automagically integrated into every seed.”
Truly inspirational stuff, wouldn’t you agree?
Why we’re excited about Diaspora
Of course we don’t profess to be building the next Facebook killer, or Twitter killer, (although we are building some very cool new business products right now, that we’ll be writing about here soon) but what we really like is that, like us, they’re building something new, they’re building things that haven’t been done before, and, like us, aren’t put off by challenges that some people would simply say is too hard.
We’re eagerly awaiting the launch of Diaspora because we may just be about to see something truly amazing and mind blowing.
It’s working on projects like Diaspora that gets people like us really excited – because at heart we’re creative, we want to help our clients build the website of their dreams, we love being able to say ‘yep, we can do that’ when a client looks at us across the table in excited expectation at after explaining their idea. In short we love innovation and challenges from our clients.
Founder and CEO of Valegro, Pieter Coetzee, had this to say about the new social network “The Diaspora crew should inspire us all, because it’s only when you realise the truly awesome power of code and people that you realise that anything really is possible. Our online marketing guru will be jumping on Diaspora the minute it launches to help our clients maximise the opportunitites this exciting new venture brings.”
To discuss how our work and expertise and may be able to help you, please contact us on 03 9018-7510, or via this form. To read about some of the work we’ve done for our clients please follow this link.