This may be a controversial statement in the coming months, but I’ll say it: I have friends who work at LimeWire. I personally have nothing against the technology, although I do believe that most of its uses have been illegitimate and maybe even illegal (I have no proof, no data; this is just anecdotal). BitTorrent, too. It took me a while to realize this, but I think Diaspora is getting backing because it attracts the same set of users.
Diaspora is a great idea. And there is genuine, legitimate interest in it. But why do more than 5,000 people back an obscure project like this? Because it tickled certain keywords. Like “peer-to-peer”. “Encrypted.” “Share.” Even “Seed”. (Note to self: these should make great SEO keywords for this blog post, too!). Gray-market sharing sites are like a floating crap game. Every once in a while, the game has to move.
The legitimate interest is in the legitimate uses of the technology. It’s the “right thing” for the social web to be more distributed. It’s the “right thing” for people to have the option of owning their data. This kind of technology can bring the social web out of the dark ages of everyone working the land to benefit Facebook and Zynga. It can make everyday users social web “land owners”. And I think Donald Trump would agree, owning land is where it’s at.
[...] for a year or hire people to do the work; either would be a wise way to use the cash). Of course, not all their motivations may be positive, but that’s not relevant to the [...]