Are you implying that Tim Cook is secretly leading Google into attacking Apple to somehow give himself more power and will eventually issue an order to the retail people to kill off the members of the board and other shareholders so there's noone left to oppose him? If so I find your ideas interesting and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

The idea is certainly interesting and I was even looking into the source and debated contributing to it when it first came out. I was not impressed with what I saw and when I thought about the concept I saw a few major issues with the idea of creating a decentralized network which weren't easy to overcome and the Diaspora developers weren't ready to tackle.

1. Cost: Anything costs money to run and it would be inevitable that one pod would grow to be substantially larger than the others and would have to be able to scale up to meet the demand so money would have to come from somewhere. It would be difficult to put ads up when your software is open source so others can set up their own pod easily and criticize your use of ads. I also believe most people wouldn't donate.
2. Trust: This is probably the biggest issue with decentralization. Most people won't just trust some random person who would be very difficult to find and sue if they screw up. The main node is currently the most popular to my knowledge and it would be difficult to convince companies people trust like Microsoft, Google, etc. when it's difficult to differentiate themselves, there's risk of being undercut easily and they can make a lot on advertising on proprietary alternatives that aren't as easy to compete with.
3. Development effort: The decentralized nature means it's a lot more work to develop new features since they have to behave nicely with other nodes. One of the big difficulties is adding new features or overhauling existing ones because they either have to not be decentralized, be designed to be backwards compatible with other less up to date nodes, or can not use these features with nodes that don't yet support them. It also means much greater potential for bugs when nodes with various versions of the software communicate and then it's a lot more work debugging than if you controlled the whole software / hardware stack.

In the end my fiancee and I created our own social network. We plan to open source it if it ever gets any popularity, but we want to keep it centralized with potential communication via versioned APIs and OAuth. We have way more features, including a mobile app, than Diaspora despite receiving no money and doing it all in our spare time and we're quite happy with where it's going.

Quantum states of entertainment and arousal... interesting.

What does the scouter say about the cloud's power level?

I would really like to know what you think makes a real alternative. I have created my own social network and I'm working towards providing the same features that Facebook has and has much greater ability to customize it, and I'm planning for a lot more, but I'd be interested in what you think creates a real alternative to Facebook.

It would definitely be nice, but it's probably as likely as getting 1TB holographic discs before then.

I didn't expect the data to be too bad. I was originally looking at using Google's admob since the site already uses adsense. After reading you post I decided to see what data Google actually gets and although it gets a good chunk of information on the client, all it really takes from the page is the URL. So Google only gets that URL which they can then try to crawl, but that's only available if the user is public and it's not a page that requires the user to be signed in. Do you have reason to believe the mobile ad networks take much data?

Unless you or one of your friends use any apps

I'm pretty interested in how they're going to try to monetize mobile after spending a ton of money on Instagram and other mobile companies. Finishing up my own mobile app, I decided to not put ads in part because Facebook and Google don't have them on mobile, but mostly because the interface is already so limited and I didn't want it to be incredibly frustrated trying to use it without accidentally click ads all the time.

I think they'll have a very difficult time creating a mobile app with ads which doesn't completely alienate their user base.

As the owner of a small startup, just myself and my fiancee, in the same space as Facebook I have to disagree with you. We have minimal ads and cover our costs and that's all we'll ever need out of it. We created it in large part because we hate the way Facebook operates and have opted for pseudonyms, minimal information required to use it and one of our philosophies is private by default. The site can run at no profit or even a slight loss indefinitely and we'd still be quite happy if people are still using it.

I also work full-time as a Software Developer and the site is useful as something to put on my resume and to advertise for our business. It's also a great hobby, I can't not work on software projects in my spare time and although our user base is still quite small, my work reaches more people than the previous projects I was doing in my spare time, and that's just awesome. Get to work on a ton of neat stuff too. We recently made our stream automatically update using a WebSocket server and we're just finishing up the first version of our mobile app, which lays the ground work for our API's.

Too bad videos are also a huge pain in the ass. If I went to a site and saw they wanted me to watch a video before I could register / comment you can bet I'm not sticking around.

I'm not sure you're not just trolling, but to quote the GP

Emphasis mine. Profit is only one factor and on top of that the page has a bar at the top advertising Google products and links on the left to buy the book, which they probably get a cut of. But nice try.

iPad was a pretty lousy choice, but iTouch isn't too bad on it's own. Now if they made a version designed for children ... Although it might allow them to get greater penetration in the Catholic priest market segment.

QML despite being Javascript based is used a replacement for HTML not Javascript. QtScript uses a javascript engine and is Javascript as you know it aside from using QML instead of the DOM. I personally prefer the integration of Webkit as HTML / CSS and Javascript can be used with minimal changes on other platforms and you can do heavy lifting and native functions (like changing output monitor / going full screen) with C++ which integrates nicely with the Javascript. On top of that you can create plugins in Qt so features can be added as extensions nicely.

Not sure that you're not trolling, but your argument's just silly. We don't tend to operate at peak efficiency such that if you expend more energy in one way it needs to reduce the ability of the rest of your body to function. More energy to warm yourself will cause your metabolism to rise especially since we're talking about getting exercise. This will in fact help the body in various ways including improving immune response.