Comment Re:Meanwhile... (Score 3, Insightful) 90
How fast are you expecting this to be developed?
My expectation, have been there and back again, is around 12 months of full time work for four people. This is until something is stable and usable, not what can be considered a "Facebook Killer". To be feature complete with where Facebook is *right now* will take much longer. This is, of course, assuming that their project has a solid blueprint and plan, which won't require any major rewrites or result in any major fundamental design flaws (like being spammer friendly, for instance).
Appleseed is looking at around 9 months to a year to be (basically) feature complete with Facebook, but we have the advantage of a six year head start on Diaspora. A project like this is a massive undertaking, anyone who's released code can tell you that. It's unfortunate that supporters have gotten the idea that the product that will be out in September will be anything but Alpha quality. The interesting thing is to see how Diaspora deals with it's prospective users getting antsy.
Both names don't make a lot of sense to me.
The names of the project don't have to make sense to anyone except for people running servers, really. Can you tell me, off hand, what a Joomla or a Drupal is? Users of distributed social networking hubs only have to know that lolcatfans.tk and havardalumni.edu are compatible with the broader open social network.
Michael Chisari
The Appleseed Project - http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/