@cstromeyer – What is a “cloud” as used here? Is it an AWS instance or similar? I think you are using the word in a way that is unfamiliar to me (thus “clouding the issue ;^)
When I think of “cloud computing” I think of services running in virtual machines implemented in a clustered host. I suppose the clustering part is more or less optional, but the instances certainly need to be scalable (even if the services contained therein aren’t necessarily.)
Can you clarify what you mean by a “cloud”?
Diaspora is not really a “cloud” technology AFAIK, just a distributed peer-to-peer system. Certainly it could be implemented in a VM on the user’s machine, rendering it somewhat “cloudlike”, but all that really is necessary is a webserver, MongoDB and Rails. BTW I was subscribed to the diaspora-dev list until very recently, so I have some recent idea what’s going on in the dev community there.
Here’s a link for anyone interested in those discussions:
http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/topics
It may require a Google ID for access.