Personally I hate extra features; but that doesn't mean that the possibility shouldn't exist. Diaspora's plans for opening up their system appears to be "we'll

Personally I hate extra features; but that doesn't mean that the possibility shouldn't exist. Diaspora's plans for opening up their system appears to be "we'll add plugins later." This seems fundamentally flawed to me. I'd rather use a protocol that had a minimalistic base that could then be extended with the desired functionality. I really don't care about relationship statuses, so why should I have my profile cluttered with them? The best extensions of a flexible protocol would grow in popularity as users demanded them; instead of having to wait for the Diaspora team or some other ruling body to approve your patch to add in a new feature, you could write your own extension to the base protocol and convince other people to implement that extension on their profiles. If other people liked them then they'd tell their friends, and the extension would spread organically according to demand, not by decree of some Overload of the Social Networks. I don't really care about the users and features at this point; the foundation is what matters, and it seems to me that the current foundations are all low-grade concrete and not reinforced at all with rebar.