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“Diaspora, the ‘anti-Facebook’, is doomed”, says Milo Yiannopoulos of the Telegraph.

I agree, but not for the reasons Milo gives. He says Diaspora will fail because:

1. Facebook’s really big.
2. Zuck’s invested in it.
3. There’s a lot of competition.
4. Facebook’s well funded.
5. Diaspora hasn’t launched yet.

I think those are simply the problems that any startup is bound to face – indeed, the situation was largely the same when facebook launched against the giant that was myspace, or when Microsoft decided to enter the same market as IBM.

But the topic itself is an interesting one. An investigation into how a startup might challenge Facebook’s dominancy will doubtless reveal some insights into more general approaches that web endeavors can take to sweep away their competitors.

Diaspora’s particular approach is to decentralise and personalise social networks, by which I mean it takes away centralised control and hands it back to users. On this point I agree with Milo; “the idea of hosting your own social network only appeals to geeks”. Even so, there are enough geeks to have donated $200,000 (source) so far, and perhaps a geek focused social network is a large enough niche to make some headway. Diaspora also make a big point on their privacy, but again, most users won’t care enough to invest in switching networks – Facebook have been slowly but surely introducing users to the idea of sharing everything, with no discernible slowdown in user adoption.

So, perhaps Diaspora won’t be the competitor who will have the unique selling point to steal users away, but how might a venture like Diaspora triumph over Facebook? What would it take to topple the giant?

Well, let’s examine three ways they could differentiate themselves:

1) Technical Superiority.

This is how Google won search, simply by delivering a better technical product than its competitors. The clutter-free design and narrow focus on search are much lauded aspects of the company, but it’s the original PageRank algorithm that got Google where they are today. I didn’t switch because they had a less cluttered homepage than Yahoo! or Lycos, I switched because they delivered better results. Incidentally, notice how the focus has broadened and their design is more cluttered than it once was – certainly among their non-search products. Their technological superiority remains the core USP of Google.

Can this be used to kill Facebook?

With search, there’s a very concrete goal; connecting a user’s information need (expressed as a query) with relevant content. There are even statistical metrics like precision and recall which scientifically evaluate how well a search engine fulfills that goal.

It’s not so easy to see what qualifies as technical superiority when it comes to social networks. What’s the user intent on facebook? There do exist use cases where the user has a specific goal; sharing photos for example, but it’s not the primary goal. Photo sharing is an addon to facebook, not the raison d’etre.

Diaspora tries to establish technical superiority over facebook by implementing a peer-to-peer architecture. In real life, social networks are indeed peer-based, so it makes some sense that the technical structure should mimic that personal relationship. But what impact would a p2p structure have on user experience? I don’t see how it’ll have any impact at all.

You might argue speed, but with a powerful enough datacenter a centralised solution can match peer-to-peer for a facebook-like application. (Note that we’re not talking about transferring massive amounts of data, or requiring resiliency, for which p2p architectures are indeed superior to centralised).

So why else would you want a p2p social network? Control? We’re already agreed that users don’t care. Perhaps there’s scope in educating them that they should care, but users were sold the idea that to share their content, they need to hand control to a 3rd party application a long time ago, and for the most part that model has proven mutually beneficial, and stood the test of time. If Diaspora want to disrupt that model, then they need to disrupt the way the web itself is used.

Are there other technical ways to create a better facebook? Definitely. At the core of facebook is status updates. The reason facebook exists is to keep you up-to-date with the friends you care about.

Now go and read every one of the top 20 updates on your facebook. How many do you actually care about? Four? Well that’s a problem which can be fixed in two ways: 1) have more interesting friends and 2) have software cherry-pick the best updates.

Facebook tries to solve this by 1) suggesting friends for you (really badly), and 2) picking out “top news” (also badly). So here’s a weakness of facebook that needs to be solved on a technical level. If Diaspora manages to filter out the irrelevant updates from people I knew 3 years ago, and suggests I become friends with people who might have something interesting to say, then that will be a big technical win. Sadly I don’t think that’s a direction they’re going in, but it is a weakness of facebook which is waiting for someone to exploit it.

At the core, this is actually a search problem – finding relevant items given my information need. Unlike google where the user hands the information need on a plate in the form of a query, social information needs are expressed in the form of liking and commenting. The next generation of social network will analyse your likes and updates and feed those into a model to find the best matched friends and updates for you. You could even implement a kind of pageRank where frequently liked friends were given better weightings. I’m calling it friendRank, and you heard it here first.

So as far as technical superiority goes there are some big opportunities to beat facebook, but Diaspora seems to have focussed on an overly ambitious one which doesn’t actually matter to users.

2) Interface

This is how Apple won the mp3 player market. Did the first iPod have better features than competitors? Better storage capacity? No, but it was small, had a big screen and had a revolutionary interface with the click wheel (which incidentally paved the way for multitouch). Sure there were technical innovations too, but central to the success of the iPod classic was the design and interface.

Can facebook be beaten on interface alone?

Absolutely. There’s always room for product differentiation when it comes to design. Often, simply being different from the status quo is enough to get you attention. We’re all very used to facebook’s top status bar, column based layout, the nomenclature of notifications, updates and tagging. If a new product comes along which offers a radically different interface, it’ll be enough to generate some initial interest. How about a product which lays all your contacts out on a zoomable interface, grouped by network so you can see a physical landscape of your friends? Or some kind of 3d layout? Or like a spider’s web, showing the connections and shared interests? Nowhere is it written that social networks have to look like a flat, scrolling “wall” of updates. There’s definite room for innovation there. In fact the way the wall works is really not very social at all. Bob’s update is dumped on top of Sue’s but Bob and Sue don’t even know each other! The visual metaphor of a wall does not convey any information about the relationships between people.

However, any new interface must also be usable – simply being different will get you attention, but this is a product which will be used every day. That initial attention will soon turn into scorn if the interface doesn’t allow users to get things done. Case in point: the ‘toolband’ in newer versions of Microsoft Office.

There really are a whole host of assumptions in the facebook design which can be improved upon. Who says time is the best way to sort updates? It matters more for real-time networks like twitter, but I check facebook in the morning, at lunch and in the evening. Joe wrote a really interesting update at 10:30, but I’ll never see it because there’s an hour and a half’s worth of status messages and farmville on top of it by the time I log in at twelve. So there’s serious room for improvement in the interface here, and it can be the defining feature of your world-beating product. Creative’s Jukebox had 20Gb storage against iPod’s 5Gb, and was released a whole year before the iPod classic (). It was defeated by Apple on the interface, not on features. The iPod beat the Jukebox by being easier to use.

So what’s hard about facebook? Not a lot at first glance; but when you start counting clicks, a lot of common actions take more than 3 clicks. Use case: I want to share that photo of you. It takes 9 clicks and some typing to create an album, upload a photo, tag a friend and publish, this can be streamlined to make the user experience easier. These considerations can have a huge impact for users, and competitors would do well to concentrate on the interface above everything else. After all, everyone from my niece to my nan are on facebook, it needs to work well for them both. Geeks will be happy exploring a new site, clicking on stuff to see what it does, others aren’t so inquisitive and if they can’t figure out how to do it, they’ll go back to facebook.

Looking at the first-look screenshots of Diaspora, it… well, it’s basically facebook, isn’t it? The layout and colours are just lifted straight from facebook, even down to the profile pic on the top left, the statusbar on top and the blue and white colour theme.

Very disappointing – there’s no innovation in the interface that I can see at all, and I don’t think that’s because there’s no room for improvement on facebook’s, I think it’s because Diaspora haven’t re-examined the assumptions that facebook have made at a deep level. Which is worrying, because that’s something that needs to be done if you want to be seen as anything more than a clone.

3) Focus

By keeping a tight focus on professional social networking, LinkedIn is succeeding in facebook’s shadow by deliberately not competing with facebook. It’s essentially the same product, but it differentiates itself by chalking out a lucrative subset of the market – professionals. This it does to great effect – it’s the 27th most visited website in the world ().

Can a focused product beat facebook?

Of course; by shifting focus, you can clearly make headway in the social networking market. By focusing on a niche in the market, you can better serve a slice of the audience – linkedin for professionals, myspace for musicians, deviantart for artists, flickr for photographers.

You might think that by specialising, you forfeit the chance to take the whole cake. But while facebook is now a generic solution for the general market, remember that it started as a niche product for university students before diversifying to the wider populace. And even if your product doesn’t experience the same massive growth and diversification as facebook, there are still gains to be made in the niche markets.

Another example is that of etsy – taking market share away from eBay by focusing on becoming a marketplace for home made arts and crafts. Indeed, unlike the cold commercial atmosphere of eBay, etsy is well placed to start their own social network. By building a userbase in a different market and then adding a social network once you’ve built up the numbers, it’s possible to sneak up on facebook. This is the approach taken by many “web2.0″ outfits. Building a social network on top of another niche product allows you to seed your network with your existing users, and brand the network as a feature of the original product, creating a win-win scenario. If the social network fails to take off, you’ve still got the underlying product (such as flickr’s photo sharing, or etsy’s marketplace), so it’s a way of diversifying to avoid risk too. In fact, facebook’s own strategy was similar; create a niche userbase in university students and then broaden out to the general populace – if it didn’t take, they’d still have the university niche nicely wrapped up.

It may well turn out that Diaspora’s niche is geeks, but I’m not sure if they know that yet, and I’m not sure if geeks want a social network; we tend to divide our time between hackernews, reddit, github, twitter, stackoverflow and all the various other places.

The bottom line: Geeks already have a decentralised extensible social network and it’s called the internet.

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