About a year ago a friend encouraged me to sign up for FB. "Facebook?" I grumbled, "Isn't that the New AOL?" My pal persisted, saying it really was a good way

About a year ago a friend encouraged me to sign up for FB. "Facebook?" I grumbled, "Isn't that the New AOL?" My pal persisted, saying it really was a good way to keep up with what the kids were doing. So I signed up, found that indeed it was a good way to find long-lost pals from my misspent youth. But other than that it was pretty much a wasteland - stupid games and crap. Zuck's privacy policies were troubling as well. So I tightened everything down as much as possible, contributed little, and monitored the "recent news" feed once every week or two. What do I get from FB? Mostly simply the ability to find people; it's the closest thing to an internet phone book. You're better off searching FB for an odd acquaintance than you are Googling him. But outside of that, email works fine for me. All I need is a "white pages" service. So I'd suggest that what the FOSS community should provide is exactly that, just a white pages registry. Put your real name and email address in and await queries from the registry: "Do you know John Doe? He's asked for your email address." Such a registry would block mass requests, or only allow so many queries a month with more than a degree or two of separation from your existing acquaintances. Someone here start that up, okay?