@warmi: I totally disagree. If people didn’t see the benefits of freedom & openness in the Internet then we’d still all be using AOL / Compuserve. And of course people did use these services until something better came along – and it wasn’t a ‘new’ Compuserve model. I say the days of the isolated cloud model are numbered, it’s just too new for regular people to have gotten fed up with it yet. Just because the technology behind the internet has gotten better every year, doesn’t mean gated, centralised, corporate controlled communities like Facebook are actually a good idea – they just happen to be the early adopters which need to adopt certain business models to attract investment, models which aren’t actually in the best interest of their users. I see them as a good experiment but ultimately an evolutionary dead end; 5 years from now I bet we’ll have backed up and addressed the core ‘need’ in a way which more naturally reflects an open & distributed system like the Internet.

The future is going to be about putting a lot more about ourselves on the Internet. We’re going to want to partition it into friend stuff, professional stuff, personal stuff, private stuff, and get to it anywhere, securely, without anyone prying at it. It’s going to be complex, so it all needs to work consistently. Moreso, we need the ability to control it ourselves, or at best relatively local service providers that we trust to manage it. Centralised services like Facebook will never scale to this level, and even if they could, we could never trust a central corporation to hold all the data for everyone in the world. The idea of a single centralised island just for personal stuff, controlled by a company in the US is going to seem quaint and old-fashioned in a few years.

There is nothing to go back to.
Things only got better since the mid 90s.
It is the same internet , you still can do everything you were able to do 10 years ago.

It is only a matter of someone with enough skills and vision coming up with an open source equivalent of Facebook … they would have to compete with guys like Zuckerberg but that has nothing to do with liberty or open source or the Internet … it is the age old question who can build a better mousetrap.
Believe me , people won’t give a damn if your site is more open, libertarian or is run by a sadistic maniac – you just need to be build a better mousetrap and they will come.

It’s just a matter of time for the Internet to return to a libertarian, open model in this subject area too. … I’ll be the one with the popcorn watching the ship go down with a big grin on my face.

What scares me is that people have been saying the same thing about operating systems and Microsoft for the past 20 years.

All it takes is some competitor buyouts (eg. how is it in the customer’s interest for Yahoo to sell out to MS?), legal bullshit (patents, etc), and a dash of not-perfectly-legal skullduggery, and one company can make an entire industry grind to a near standstill. Hopefully Facebook, at least, won’t be smart (or lucky) enough to pull that kind of thing off.

(Facebook is useful for one thing, though: It brings up the fact that more form fields need an “it’s complicated” option.)

Part of me hates the time-wasting element of Facebook, particularly all the bloody stupid ‘applications’ that people pepper their profiles with. I want to puke when I see someone send a ‘gift’ – it’s cras and ridiculous. But, getting rid of all that guff I can see the useful core functionality there (non-techs sharing stuff easily & privately) – I just think the centralised Facebook model is entirely the wrong vehicle for it, albeit the only practical one ATM. I think it’s a total dead end and the antithesis of what the Internet stands for, and I can’t wait for it to be superceded, something this is entirely inevitable IMO.

With that in mind, the thing that irritates me most is that people like Zuckerberg take a ton of investment money on the back of just being a popularist portal, on the assumption that one day it will turn into a vast money making machine. That his whole business proposition revolves around ever-fickle Internet fashion, and yet people still chuck money at him, like the bubble will never burst. The fact that he comes across as a bit of an arrogant douche with very little of interest to say doesn’t help of course.

It’s just a matter of time for the Internet to return to a libertarian, open model in this subject area too. If Facebook’s investors can’t see it, great – I’ll be the one with the popcorn watching the ship go down with a big grin on my face.

Compare MSN Messenger (or whatever stupid name they’re calling it this will) or AIM, with XMPP. Likewise Twitter with Identi.ca.

To put that into a Facebook context, you would be looking at an open source implementation of a Facebook-type platform that anyone could host, and with the ability for multiple instances of that to interoperate to form a larger system.

Not sure why you care though, you hate the whole idea of Facebook don’t you?