This is extreme echo-chamber bias. Facebook has gone mainstream and their changes so far have only increased engagement and traffic.
The fact that some early adopters and their little cliques are jumping around from service to service every 6 months in search of the new hotness does not say a whole lot about the future of any of these services.
In my opinion it's going to be hard for any startup to cross the chasm and displace Facebook in the next 10 years. I know that's a bold statement, but look at the people who are using it now. You're not going to suck average people in with some incrementally better service with no critical mass.
Why has Twitter's growth suddenly dropped off compared to Facebook's? Because regular people joined, followed celebrities, found out they had nothing interesting to say, asked "that's it?" and left. Facebook provides value to almost any real person right now. While a federated stream is nice in theory, it doesn't really mean anything to anyone except extroverted geeks and San Francisco hipsters.
WordPress and WordPress MU are complete PHP4 hackjobs. It is a developer's nightmare to fine-tune any website that uses these platforms. Since BuddyPress just turned stable and barely has any plugins, it is not worth its salt as a Social Platform, unlike Vanilla 2, which uses the MVC design pattern and ships with just as much if not more out-of-the-box features. The OP's suggestion makes 0 sense.
The main reason, I find, that people use WP is because it is free and does the relatively simple task to managing and displaying a blog decently out of the box.
If WordPress was completely rewritten (like Vanilla 2 was in lieu of Vanilla 1), then I'd change my argument. But you'd lose the thousands of plugins it currently supports, though perhaps only 100 of out them are actually production-ready.
"Seesmic, Tweetdeck and the top three or four iPhone Twitter clients could form a consortium and suddenly mirror everything that takes place on Twitter to a third party or federated platform – in essence deprecating Twitter and Facebook in one fell swoop."
Unless these clients start duplicating the entire functionality of Facebook, that is completely untrue. Facebook is much more than a Twitter-esque messaging platform.
Yes, I did read the post. Haven't had to try to use it (because of a colleague's specification of WordPress for one site for one of my organizations), I'm not convinced that WordPress is built on the right base of fundamental design choices to meet those needs. In other words, I think WordPress is a kluge. A different webmaster of another website I am closely familiar with uses completely different tools to do what WordPress supposedly does, and finds his site much easier to run as an administrator and much easier for contributing users as co-authors.
I think that largely depends on how you have it set up, and how much of a coder you are. It's definitely geared to be a nice compromise for folks that are jacks of all trades and masters of none. It appeals to the coder and the writer in me, since I split my time between the two.
The fact that some early adopters and their little cliques are jumping around from service to service every 6 months in search of the new hotness does not say a whole lot about the future of any of these services.
In my opinion it's going to be hard for any startup to cross the chasm and displace Facebook in the next 10 years. I know that's a bold statement, but look at the people who are using it now. You're not going to suck average people in with some incrementally better service with no critical mass.
Why has Twitter's growth suddenly dropped off compared to Facebook's? Because regular people joined, followed celebrities, found out they had nothing interesting to say, asked "that's it?" and left. Facebook provides value to almost any real person right now. While a federated stream is nice in theory, it doesn't really mean anything to anyone except extroverted geeks and San Francisco hipsters.