The idea that centralization leads to better UX results is demonstrably false. Popcorn Time is a great example of distributed streaming providing a considerably

The idea that centralization leads to better UX results is demonstrably false. Popcorn Time is a great example of distributed streaming providing a considerably better UX than most commercial solutions. Additionally, the notion that the necessity of making group decisions on a protocol must lead to stagnation is not guaranteed. There's plenty of space for Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter to form an an industry working group and make a protocol that meets their needs, and then throw it out and say "this is what we're using. Keep up or get left behind". However, to more directly answer your concerns, there's nothing stopping Facebook from exposing basic functionality via an established and fairly firm protocol, and keeping advanced features as their competitive advantage. Textual Timeline posts, IM's and event RSVP's are good candidates for things to be exposed by the protocol. Facial tagging of images is a good example of something that a core social protocol could skip.