It's not just a bad idea. It's really cruel. I have been to a first-rate grad school. I have read Pepper White's The Idea Factory, a book which gave me nightmares and made me want to travel across the campus offering hugs to every grad student I could find. And thus I have seen some of the best minds of my generation driven into near-suicidal depression by their self-perceived inability to live up to their expectations of greatness, or their parents' expectations, or their own perception of their parents' expectations. And these are people without an audience of thousands.

So I'm really afraid for these Diaspora guys. Way too much spotlight, way too soon. Startup ideas fail; that is what they do most of the time. Are these guys going to be given room to fail a few times? Or are they ultimately going to need therapy?

Let me try to help: If the Diaspora team gets together at the end of September and puts on a Youtube production of Springtime for Hitler I'll send them fifty bucks. If they ship some software as well, I'll make it sixty.

See part 8, and in particular the third paragraph:

http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html

It makes me wince for HN to see so many people upvoting the parent. It's not just the meanness of it; it's that it's both mean and wrong. Surely at this point everyone is at least familiar with the strategy of launching something minimal and then expanding it. And yet here is a startup doing exactly the right thing, and they have a mob jeering at them.

This is underappreciated. I had a girlfriend who was an accountant. At the end of the day, she'd want to vent about work, and guess what? I couldn't follow her without asking some questions about accounting. Suddenly, I was interested in accounting, because I wanted to understand why she was annoyed or stressed or happy or relieved when she got home from work, and I didn't want to just nod and say "uh huh, uh huh" while she was talking about something that was an important part of her life. Now I don't give two shits about accounting.

If that's unusual, sign me up for an unusual woman.

1 - the phone came with waaaay substandard service - no live customer service, barely service via email

2 - no chance for the wide consumer market to play with the phone or interact with the phone with online sales only

3 - mixed reviews from the professional tech review community

So while I agree google made an attempt it felt to me much more like a half assed try in the context of this thread