More Awesome Than Money

by Jim Dwyer

  Max spoke a mile a minute. Dan barely uttered a sound. Fraser suggested they draw the problem. Whether her students were garrulous or not, Fraser had often found that when people were at least temporarily emancipated from expressing themselves verbally, they could convey a thought visually. So Dan and Max drew an iceberg, a waterline where the peak protruded, and the underground mass. That tip was what people revealed online, shown to their weakest ties, the tiniest, usually least consequential bits of ephemera. Most of a person’s identity was unseen, below the waterline. The hoariest of clichés, but it covered the ground that they needed. The fundamental shortcoming of the existing social networks, at least as the four saw it, was that everyone got to see the whole online iceberg. It was a dimension of the privacy problem that was a subset of the larger concern that had been mapped by Eben Moglen.

  “Wouldn’t it be good if you could really share with your strong ties?” Fraser asked.

  —

  Rafi was, in many ways, the oldest soul of the group, poker-faced under virtually all level of provocation. A diligent coder, he nevertheless did not permit the ravenous appetite of the project to consume all hours of his life. One day in mid-August, he called in sick. A stomach bug had laid him low. He was gone for the better part of a week, giving him an escape from the Diaspora grind.

  While Rafi was away, Max brushed up on theories about the optimal, realistic size of an individual’s social networks. On Facebook, people could have up to five thousand “friends,” a boundary so elastically promiscuous as to dilute the concept of friendship beyond recognition. Maybe, Max mused, Diaspora should emphasize quality over wholesale faint acquaintanceship.

  Two decades earlier, Robin Dunbar, an English anthropologist, had studied thirty-eight primate species to see if the size of the neocortex—the “thinking” area of the brain—related to the number of stable social relationships the primate was able to maintain. Indeed it did. Based on the volume of the typical human neocortex, Dunbar projected that the mean number of relationships for people was 147.8. Roughly defined, that was how many people an individual could reasonably ask a favor of.

  His number was heavily critiqued. Checked against real life, the research stood up: communities of Amish, the Bushmen of South Africa, Hutterites, Native American tribes, and military companies all formed into groups of about 150. Bill Gore, the inventor of Gore-Tex fabric, walked into one of his early factories and realized that he no longer knew everyone. From then on, he built parking for only 150 people at each site, to ensure that the factories would not get beyond what he regarded as a manageable level.

  More intimately, the primates studied by Dunbar belonged to smaller “grooming cliques,” a social function that, he postulated, was replaced in humans by language. Whether they were picking bugs out of one another’s hair, listening to tales of golf shots, or going on shopping trips, people got psychopharmacological benefits from the contacts, Dunbar and others argued.

  It was the study of human networks that gave rise to the concept of “six degrees of separation.” In 1967, a psychologist named Stanley Milgram sent letters to random people in Omaha, Nebraska, and Wichita, Kansas, and explained that the final destination was a stockbroker in Boston. The object was for the people in the midwestern United States to mail their letters to someone they knew on a first-name basis who, in turn, might know the stockbroker. As letters moved along the chain, each person who received one was given the same instructions. The median number of “hops” was five and a half or six. Milgram published an article on the study in the premier issue of Psychology Today, and later in academic journals. His methodology was widely criticized for introducing various kinds of experimental biases, and failing to account for the high percentage of letters that simply dropped out of the study. He died in 1984.

  Yet Milgram was not far off. As Facebook encircled the world in digital ribbons, it provided data for the largest study ever conducted of social networks. It showed how many paths were needed to connect any two people, assuming they were not friends. Researchers working with Facebook reported in 2011 that 92 percent of all Facebook users—then about 721 million—could be connected in a path of five people, and 99.7 percent in a path of six. The average distance in the United States was 4.3 people.

  So, yes, Milgram was right: there were no more than six degrees or so of separation among humans. But so was Dunbar: meaningful relationships didn’t extend much beyond the second degree. The same study found that the median number of friends an individual member had was ninety-nine, and while there were people with thousands of friends, most had fewer than two hundred.

  After Rafi came back, the four of them discussed it in a conference room.

  “There’s research that shows 150 is the number of relationships a person can plausibly maintain,” Max said. “I think that limiting it to 150 would be something we would do.”

  The other guys thought there was some merit to this view, but Rafi came from sprawling families on both sides. Given a few minutes, he could probably add up more than one hundred cousins by going out to the second degree. About ten days earlier, a woman approached Rafi in the airport in Portland, Oregon, when they were on their way back to San Francisco from the federated social web conference.

  “Are you a Sofaer?” she asked Rafi.

  She, of course, was another cousin.

  Limiting the number of friends on Diaspora to 150? He’d never get past family members.

  “I think that’s a terrible idea,” Rafi said. “I would never use that product.”

  It was the kind of argument that flushed them out of the software engineering cave and into a conversation about social values.

  “You can’t be private with a thousand friends,” Max said.

  Rafi made a face. He understood that. But the hard cap on how many friends? He foresaw tiffs and hurt feelings over who was in, who was out. “This could bring back high school,” Rafi said.

  Max suggested that Rafi’s resistance to the limit was due to his stomach virus.

  “And you’ll agree,” Max said, “when you get whatever was in the water last week out of your system.”

  “I wasn’t infected by whatever bullshit you heard last week,” Rafi said.

  —

  Late one afternoon, a tall and massive man with a shaved head stepped from the elevator on the third floor of 731 Market Street, and into the buzzing floor of Pivotal Labs. There was no receptionist. Instead, Yosem E. Companys beheld dozens of long tables and people plugged into headphones and laptops. No one seemed to be in charge, but the space had the focused energy of an anthill. He wandered from one end of the floor to the other, a city block, looking for faces he knew only from photographs.

  A few times he asked people who didn’t seem to be fully absorbed by their computer screens if they knew where the guys from Diaspora were. No one did. Of course, the four had no idea what Yosem looked like. Of the thousands of strangers who had gotten in touch with them, his messages had been the most resonant. Not long after he said he was going to bring them to the attention of Randy Komisar, they heard directly from the VC. He introduced them to a half dozen other people. All of this was done by e-mail, while they were in New York and Yosem was on the other side of the country in Palo Alto. When they moved out west, the fellows had invited him to dinner in thanks for all the introductions and spadework he had done.

  He arrived a bit early. So he sat down at an open computer and ran through his e-mail for a little while, then wandered down to one of the conference areas and spotted someone he recognized: Ellen Pao, a Kleiner Perkins partner who worked with Randy Komisar. She was just finishing a meeting with the four.

  The guys all greeted him warmly and strolled a few blocks to a restaurant Ilya liked and settled into a booth.

  A PhD student at Stanford who had degrees from Yale and Harvard, Yosem, thirty-five, was not only more than a decade the elder of any of th
e Diaspora group but he also had been marinated in entrepreneurial culture as an academic and a professional. He had worked in investment banking at Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, researched intelligent work systems for General Motors, and brand management at Procter & Gamble. He was involved with an online group called Liberation Technology that shared news about ways for political activists to communicate while minimizing harassment. Believing in their cause, he was keen to help make Diaspora a reality.

  “How did you even hear about us?” Ilya asked.

  It was quite a story. Yosem and friends had been fed up with Facebook and its policies for quite a while, and believed that a distributed network, like the one the Diaspora crew had in mind, was the best answer. For much of the previous year, Yosem had been fighting a brain tumor, and stopped work on his doctoral dissertation for surgery in December 2009. Doctors tinkered with his hormones and prescribed heavy doses of steroids, adding bulk to his large frame. To occupy himself during the lengthy recovery, he had been having deep online discussions about how a peer-to-peer social network would function—precisely what Eben Moglen had been advocating. It was then that he discovered the plans for Diaspora, which he immediately passed along to Randy Komisar, who had taught a class on entrepreneurship at Stanford. Yosem had been his teaching assistant. He had also pulled at the sleeve of Tim Draper, a third-generation Silicon Valley venture capitalist who had backed ventures like Skype and Hotmail. Draper, too, asked to hear more about Diaspora. Yosem was startled by the instant interest both Draper and Komisar had shown.

  Every week, Max told him, they were meeting with one of two people at Kleiner Perkins, either Randy or Ellen. There had been no discussions of funding as yet, but it was clear they were interested. “Time with VCs is more important than money,” Yosem said. “There’s an old saying about VCs in Silicon Valley: ask for money and get advice. Ask for advice, and you’ll get money.”

  After a few minutes, Yosem, who taught graduate engineering students at Stanford, realized that the fundamentals of venture capital financing were total mysteries to these kids who had never been outside a college campus. He started with the basics: how the shares of a company were diluted through various rounds, with early investors being rewarded for taking the most risk by getting the biggest stake for the smallest investment.

  Ilya started taking notes on a napkin.

  Randy Komisar had been pushing them to build a private network for friends and family. Yosem thought the idea had merit. Social network theory, which in sociology predated digital networks, was one of his academic interests.

  “The research shows that the average inner circle is about five people,” Yosem said. “Why don’t you create the social speed dial? Limit the number of people in your network to nine.”

  Rafi grimaced, but said nothing.

  The idea, Yosem said, was that anyone could follow your postings, but private conversations would be seen by only nine people. The idea intrigued them. It was a significant way to distinguish themselves from Facebook.

  The design of the network absorbed them, almost to the exclusion of any thought of how such a network could plausibly sustain itself. To Yosem, they seemed to have given no thought to a business plan.

  Perhaps, he suggested, they might consider operating as a not-for-profit—to find some kind of structure where they could build out Diaspora without the pressure of having to make money. But they did have some vague notions of a way that Diaspora could become a business.

  In their initial e-mails, and in conversations with Randy, they had all discussed the idea of Diaspora providing a paid service of hosting “pods,” individual servers that were under the ultimate control of the users but a task that many ordinary web surfers would find beyond their technical means. By the time they met with Yosem, all they thought about was building the thing. It seemed to him that they had bought into a piece of Silicon Valley lore that divorced business realities from digital acumen: they appeared to believe that all they needed was a working product, or something to demonstrate, and they could leave the business plans to the funders. Since they were taking advice from Kleiner Perkins, Yosem did not argue the point.

  Indeed, the Diaspora Four were delighted to have someone who just seemed to want to help them in concrete ways. And Yosem was thrilled to find people eager to build the kind of social network that many people wanted. “I was looking for someone to pick up the mantle so that I could become their evangelist,” he said.

  Casually, he offered to prepare a case study of Facebook, as well as a list of potential competitors, a remark that meant nothing in particular to the guys until a few days later, when a fourteen-thousand-word e-mail arrived from him. It was an account of the rise of Facebook, tracing its roots to initial efforts, among others, at Williams College in 1989, when Mark Zuckerberg was not yet five years old, and a decade later by a former Tiananmen Square protestor who had moved to Cambridge. The first big commercial social network site in the United States, Friendster, preceded MySpace by a year and Facebook by two years, but was hobbled by its popularity; the demand outpaced the ability of the technology available in 2002 to keep up with the capacity of the servers. (The company was underwritten, in part, by Kleiner Perkins.) By the time Mark Zuckerberg offered Facebook to a broad audience in 2004, the technical infrastructure had improved. Not only was Zuckerberg talented, farsighted, and fast moving, but his timing turned out to be perfect.

  As the dinner wound down, Ilya took out his Maker’s Notebook, which he carried everywhere to track ideas. He slipped the napkin of notes into it.

  “Someday, when we are rich and famous,” Ilya said, “we will pull out this napkin and say, ‘This is how it all started.’”

  —

  In early August, the team realized Diaspora 1.0 was hopelessly nerdish.

  They demolished it. As Brooks had prophesied in The Mythical Man-Month, they had to be ready to throw away one version, or more.

  As they rebuilt, they were quicker. Roadblocks became manageable. Getting photos into the stream had seemed, initially, to be beyond their competency.

  “Next year, maybe we will have photos,” Dan said. “Then one week, we were, like, whatever. And we had them.”

  Ilya cackled. “We thought that was never going to happen,” he said. “Maybe everything seems hard until you try it.”

  That was another lesson from the programming gurus: find a problem that interests you, and you will solve interesting problems. The Diaspora team was wrestling with a challenge that they cared about, in an area of life that was fundamental to their generation. And as daunting as the notion of designing a network had been, they had found that many building blocks were widely available. Eben Moglen had been right: Facebook was a bunch of doodads written with the PHP code that made web pages come to life, with things like pictures and status updates. By their more cherished measuring stick, innovation, Facebook was pretty minor.

  “Facebook is not that genius,” Dan said. “It’s like a stupid website. It’s a lot different than the stuff Steve Jobs is doing.”

  The basics seemed simple, Ilya said: “Social networking—I can post photos, I can post messages. And oh, I can post location. In itself, it’s just two fields in a database somewhere.”

  He paused for a moment, reflecting on the hubris, or possible ignorance, of his remark. “Maybe it’s that nothing seems hard when it’s already there,” Ilya said.

  —

  A few people at Pivotal who had taken them on as mini guidance projects spent two days going over their first version of the site, and pushed them to identify three classes of users.

  They came up with, at one extreme, people they called “beards”—free-software users—a class of übergeek, and, at the other end, “girls.” The girls and the beards were polar opposites in this rendering of humanity. (The third class, lodged in the middle, were people who used free browsers like Firefox rather than Intern
et Explorer, and were glad to employ tools that they did not have to devise themselves.)

  “We have to have girls if we are going to succeed,” Max said.

  Two of their cherished details, though, were arduous for all but the most devoted geeks: encryption of data and running an individual server. The original concept of Diaspora was that each user would have his or her own server, of the kind envisioned by Moglen for the freedom box. These individual servers would be called “seeds” (and thus the aptness of the name Diaspora, with its Greek root evoking “scattering” and “spores”). While the hardware for the seed servers existed, the day when it would be a simple plug-in and setup was some time off, awaiting the development of a stack of software that would include a social network like Diaspora.

  Moreover, Max did not want Diaspora to be just another piece of software to end up in the freedom box. “We don’t want to be part of Moglen’s army,” he said. Max had been put out by Moglen’s statement in the Wired article that he was not going to pick a favorite among projects working to create an open-source alternative to Facebook. “We thought it was heresy,” he said.

  To get wide acceptance of Diaspora in the short term, the group recognized that servers would probably have to be hosted by schools or companies. The notion of seed servers was supplanted by the idea of pods.

  Then there was the question of making encryption manageable. Both Rafi and Ilya had been deeply invested in it as an intellectual and political challenge.

  “We’re in charge of the tinfoil hats,” Rafi said.

  Encryption at one level or another had been practiced by armies and lovers for centuries. The point was to keep confidential communications from being hijacked by encasing messages in codes that, in theory, are known to only the sender and the recipient. Until the early 1990s, most strong encryption was under the control of government agencies. An antinuclear activist named Phil Zimmerman devised what he half-jokingly called Pretty Good Privacy in 1991, so that politically engaged people could communicate on Internet bulletin boards without being watched. The code quickly made its way around the world. Two years later, Zimmerman became the subject of a criminal investigation into the exporting of munitions without a license: encryption that used keys larger than 40 bits was classified as a munition under U.S. regulations, and PGP keys were at least 128 bits in size.