Other people here have said this general idea here, the large centrealized services like Google and Facebook have succeeded in becoming so big through a lot of

Other people here have said this general idea here, the large centrealized services like Google and Facebook have succeeded in becoming so big through a lot of effort and a lot of cost, which was paid for by all the money they make. At a minimum they have to pay for their server use. From what I understand the proposal here seems to not allow for the advertising model. I don't think a services can grow and survive making people paying because people are too cheap. There might be a better chance for something like this is they allow for the economics. - Maybe the data host can provide a "advertising" profile which the user has control of. This can be exposed to the application hosts to allow for advertising. - Maybe you also throw micropayments into the mix, along with bartering for information or micropayments. Another issue is complexity. A number of comments have talked bout over-engineered solutions and protocols. This decentralizezd idea could be started with something small like an open social network standard. I think I saw something similar to this on HN not too long ago: - You have a web site, which is your profile. A provider could give you a nice editor for it. - You have a feed, where you can put pictures, short posts, long posts, whatever. This is distributed with RSS. (The host makes this all seamless for you.) - Identity is controlled with OAuth, used only to give an identity to visiting users. The owner users can manage permissions for certain remote users (his "friends") Such a service could be managed on your own web server, or there could be different cloud providers that make this arbitarily easy, with arbitrary levels of functionality on the "profile" page, the "feed" and the "friend" permission management.