[QUORA] Why does Diaspora look exactly like Google+?

By Edoardo Moreni - June, 29th 2012

Diaspora is one of the most innovative projects of the last two years and when they started they were one of the most well founded projects on KickStarter. I have been so lucky to start using it at the beginning.

I have really enjoyed the work done by those four guys, which unfortunately now are three, because they believed and believe in a world made up by Free Software and Privacy. Diaspora wishes a modern world which is completely different from what we have seen in the past, a world where we are free to choose about what we want to share and how we want to do it.

These four guys started Diaspora, a Free Software Based Social Network, whose aim was to let you handle your privacy, by letting you manage your own server and data. The project is still alive and it will probably work until the donations end.

A few weeks ago, while I was surfing on Quora, I found out this question and I decided to answer in the way I wanted because I felt to know the truth.

I am telling you the truth since it is more than a year that I am on Diaspora.

They look the same, for just a simple fact. Google Plus copied Diaspora from the first to the last point. Diaspora was the first social network to start thinking in “Circles”.

They were the first to propose a new and interesting network in order to share what you want with the people you love.

You could probably say that the design is coincidence, but I don’t believe it. Someone here has cheated on another project. Diaspora was the first to be live on the internet. In this case the math is simple and the answer is simpler.

It is true to say that many ideas that Diaspora proposed were adopted in Google Plus. However there is a single factor, which makes Google Plus a better choice. Google has more than 35k employees that are better than four young programmers.

They just have the same basis, but they look different if you see them with all their features.

In conclusion if you want a simple answer to your question, I guess you should ask to Google Developers, who should know what innovation is, but in this case as in many other cases, they just copied another interesting product.

I can now say that the answer got a little bit momentum since it was upvoted 36 times and viewed almost 1800 times. Anyway I don’t believe this is the point.

Google has always introduced great products thanks to its vision and to its great team. However what they did with Diaspora wasn’t fair. They played a bad game as they are doing with Dropbox and I really regret they way they are behaving.

In order to build a great product you need to think different, you really don’t need to cheat on someone. On the other hand if you like the product, you could try to acquire it and to support it without shutting it down. I think and I believe this is the best way to act and unfortunately I can’t see it so often as I wish.

In this case Google played badly, but from what I have seen in the last two days, I feel the need to say that they are also capable to play hard and innovate (Google I/O 2012) in a way the others don’t know. For this reason they shouldn’t even do what they did with Diaspora or Dropbox, they should play on a different level with outstanding ideas.