Well actually I agree. Well-stated. Open may form part of the ultimate successor to FB. It's 100% true the average Facebook user doesn't know, and doesn't care,

Well actually I agree. Well-stated. Open may form part of the ultimate successor to FB. It's 100% true the average Facebook user doesn't know, and doesn't care, about "open". But what being open wins you is support of the community, and in particular, "developers, developers, developers". Take the (by no means parallel, but similar) case of iPhone vs. Android. The typical user could care less about whether iPhone is "open" or not, provided their apps work and their calls don't drop (heh). Still, Android makes a compelling case to developers and to handset manufacturers. Android gets huge points for being "open", and over time, I think that creates a head-leads, body-follows scenario where early adopters, tech evangelists, and people who surf sites like HN move to the new platform (whatever it is) en masse. Some time later, "normal" users then gravitate to that platform because the thought leaders have gone there, that's where the hype is, etc. To put it another way: being open doesn't necessarily win you normal, everyday users. But it can win you the power users, the early adopters, and the thought leaders; and where they go, "normal" users tend to follow in time. As for the "how do users host their own node" issue, I agree. This will never happen if people have to (my God, the horror) sign up for a web hosting account to have a Facebook page. But in an Internet where "websites" are torn off from the cloud at will, and where creating a "website" or "web identity" is as easy as pressing a button -- easier, in fact, than it is to create a Facebook page currently -- I think that's when you'll start to see user-controlled nodes become a real possibility for the mass market. Not before.