To compete with Facebook and have a desirable product in this decade you have to go at it from another angle. It should not look and feel like a social network,

To compete with Facebook and have a desirable product in this decade you have to go at it from another angle. It should not look and feel like a social network, friending, following should be a part of the service, not the focus. Perhaps something like http://cargocollective.com/ http://cargocollective.com/ where sharing, updates and follows are on a certain topic, in this case visual work. You could start several of these topic based networks, where a UI is specific to the topic. A UI for sharing code, another for blogs, news, arguing, gossip etc.. Much of that already exists in the form of Github, Flickr, HN, Reddit, it just needs to be brought together with more consistent UIs. Your main feed of all the sites would be organized by topic. Instead of going to separate sites all with different UIs, you stay on one site and focus on content, not which site you're on. If someone posts the same content topic on twitter and reddit, it should look all the same to the user. Nobody cares if it's twitter or digg, who runs the site, people just want the content. If some site doesn't include voting but you want to filter content for yourself by voting, then you can vote on tweets. Some of the privacy problems resolve themselves, because your followers tend to stay in the topic, they probably don't want to know your personal life. Only data miners will link those things together. For sharing personal details, gossip, a community builder UI could replace the difficult facebook privacy settings. Before sending out updates about your life, build lists just like you would in your AIM buddy list, send certain updates to one list, other updates to another list. Same person can be in different lists. People who get updates they don't want can remove themselves from your list by downvoting your updates on the topic for that list. A system where lists form based on likes, views, responses instead of manual controls would be best though. I don't remember if facebook had options like this, don't want to bother to find out if groups do some of this, which means it's mainly a UI problem which makes it more likely that people will engage in the spam them all behavior. So the distributed model already exists, it's just too distributed, makes it too complicated for users to use multiple sites simultaneously, so most people tend to stay on a few. Facebook would have a lot of work to do before they could turn their service away from spammy personal life nonsense into something that makes a better connected web.