I'm not sure why exactly we "need" an alternative to Facebook. But why not leverage what's already out there. I recently killed my Facebook account out of fru

I'm not sure why exactly we "need" an alternative to Facebook. But why not leverage what's already out there. I recently killed my Facebook account out of frustration from seeing their social widget all over the place. But the main reason I was using it was: a) People who felt the easiest way to do event invitations was through facebook by way of a point and click here's all my friends in one place interface. b) People sharing Photographs with groups of friends w/ discreet privacy interfaces. The C) of this list is all my friends who aslo have twitter accounts who add #fb to the end of every.damn.tweet because that's some kind of special operator to "update their profile message". The question I put forth is why not create a thin layer to pull together the services which provide these already? Twitter already does short one line status updates. Flickr has discreet friend-level privacy settings. There are 8 billion easy to use invitation services. There are other photo services which I'm not familiar with like Picassa which likely do the same. Rather than reinvent the wheel - we should be pushing for some kind of OAuth or OpenID services to tie these things together CLEARLY. Maybe a simple one-stop page to manage relationships with people, and your services. Your "profile" page can simply be "rit stores his photos at Flickr." and a link to those (or show them inline). But nothing stops me from having a friend who does things on Picassa. The last few iterations of Facebook seemed to me designed to be more and more like Twitter. Why reinvent the wheel when you can just integrate?