And while we are at it, let's deep-six Microsoft Office and have a perfectly compatible replacement (down to the VBA level) that is completely open source.
I mean, if we only have to say it, then we may as well get all our other good-sounding but completely unrealistic statements out in the open too.
Having a perfectly compatible open source MS Office replacement is a laudable goal and I'm extremely glad people have attempted it. I'm not really sure what point you're making. Nobody is saying we only have to say it and it will happen.
All of these distributed model guys keep disregarding and not addressing the fact that people simply don't want to deal with hosting their own web server, no matter how simplified it is.
I've seen a couple of people on this forum talk about (and Prodromou talks about it as well) "volunteers" who will run these micronetworks and host their friends and family. The idea just doesn't make sense.
For one thing, how many of us constantly are forced to be the "tech guy" in our friends/family circle? It SUCKS. Now imagine what you have to deal with when you're hosting a node...where do I sign up...
Now add that that to the facts that normies on facebook etc. simply don't notice or care about the privacy issues, the network effect, the ability for facebook to pivot their privacy settings, the fact that all attempts at distributed social networking to date have failed, and the conceptual issue of explaining what exactly the difference between distributed and non distributed social networking is to a non educated population who (again) doesn't know that they have a problem in the first place.
Prodromou also talks about "simple protocols" that these different social networks could use to talk to each other. I'll just leave that one at "devil in the details."
Finally he says, "Nobody keeps a global database of blogs, yet if you're trying to find, say, Doc Searle's blog, it's not very hard to do." in reference to not needing a global database of who belongs to what networks. So the issue here is that this creates the need for a Google-like replacement to index these social networks (why is it so easy to find Doc's blog? oh right.) and we are right back at square one: undistributed.
In my opinion this is a gross misunderstanding of the consumer, and reality.
I wholeheartedly agree that people gloss over a lot of issues when they talk about distributed social networks. Diaspora is not going to replace Facebook in September. I continue to have some amount of faith though.
> how many of us constantly are forced to be the "tech guy" in our friends/family circle? It SUCKS. Now imagine what you have to deal with when you're hosting a node...where do I sign up..
Hopefully some kind of standards will emerge and people will find a way to monetize hosting. "Volunteers" doesn't scale.
> Now add that that to the facts that normies on facebook etc. simply don't notice or care
At some point Facebook is likely to do something, either through craziness or error, that pisses normies off. They originally wrote their chat functionality such that third parties could read your private chats by going through a few simple steps. That kind of thing could cause normies to care a lot.
> the issue here is that this creates the need for a Google-like replacement to index these social networks
I don't see why a third party index of network nodes is a problem, as long as it only indexes information people have chosen to make public/indexable.
All of these distributed model guys keep disregarding and not addressing the fact that people simply don't want to deal with hosting their own web server, no matter how simplified it is.
It should be noted that most people simply don't want to deal with hosting their own mail server, either. Not that I disagree with most of the rest of your post.
I'm confused by the word "unmonetizeable" there. I don't see that email is unmonetizeable, and surely monetizeability is a good thing if you want third parties to adopt a protocol. Did you mean "monetizeable"?
Anyway I think email and social networking hosting are both monetizeable. Social networking is probably more so, which is a good thing in terms of getting people to host it. It's true that there isn't a strong standard protocol, but that doesn't seem to me like an intractable problem. I agree with pretty much all the issues you've raised, but I don't see it as an impossible medium-long term goal.
> An open and distributed model gives users and organizations a chance to choose their social networking platform
First fail is easily seen in the leading sentence. Most people don't really want to choose what social networking platform they use. They just want to be on the best social network and have it work for them.
"Crabgrass currently consists of a solid suite of group collaboration tools, such as private wikis, task lists, file repository, and decision making tools."
I see the point of Crabgrass, but it's hardly an alternative to Facebook/Twitter/Flickr/Foursquare.
And while we are at it, let's deep-six Microsoft Office and have a perfectly compatible replacement (down to the VBA level) that is completely open source.
I mean, if we only have to say it, then we may as well get all our other good-sounding but completely unrealistic statements out in the open too.