>So many years ago, nobody expected anything to take the place of AOL. Of Yahoo. Of MySpace. Those giants have fallen because someone decided to do something.

>So many years ago, nobody expected anything to take the place of AOL. Of Yahoo. Of MySpace. Those giants have fallen because someone decided to do something. Oh please, this is a terrible comparison. AOL was constantly mocked by general internet users, and finally died simply because it became obsolete thanks to other ISPs, web services like Gmail, etc. All of which are big companies. Yahoo died (it's dead now, but a zombie) because of other big companies, like Google, whose services users migrated to (like Gmail again). MySpace died (again, another zombie) because of the rise of Facebook, which again, is another huge company. Your "someone" who decided to "do something" in every case was a big corporation who out-competed them, not a ragtag bunch of volunteers offering something for free because they want to improve the world. I'd love it if everyone dumped Facebook and switched to Diaspora and email, but I'm sorry, there just aren't any examples at all of this kind of thing happening. Users abandon one crappy corporate service only when some other less-crappy corporate service comes along as an alternative, and the pain of switching becomes low enough to make it worthwhile for them to do so. Highly-technical users are, of course, the exception, but they pretty much never manage to convince their friends and family to abandon the corporate stuff and take up the community-driven stuff, they only succeed (sometimes) in recommending the least-crappy corporate stuff and getting people to switch to that.