Recently I received a marketing message from Diaspora by email which can also be read from Diaspora blog entry. All the credit to the team for making their thing go as far as it has. However, I was disappointed by their message. You shouldn’t claim that others are imitating your core features when the idea is not originally yours. Dividing the content subscribers in to groups by the publisher is not a new idea at all. Making it as one of the main points of the message is not convincing. Diaspora team also listed the following points as ways they are pioneering the future of the social web:
- We’ll make the social web more fun than it is today.
- Our distributed design gives you the security of owning your own identity and data.
- This also gives you the freedom to do what you want online.
- Our ecosystem provides the commons, the connective tissue for an evolving social web.
- We’re not gatekeepers, so our ecosystem will always support the latest apps.
The list is marketing talk without anything to back it up and therefore sounds too vague to be engaging. Always back up your sweet talk by actual commitments. “We added this and that feature”, “we completed the second out of three phases of protocol definition”, anything. There has to be something concrete to stand out from the crowd. That is why I simply love the Play Framework’s visualization of their progress right on the upcoming version’s “marketing” page.
