Yes, and even this is a more complicated problem than simply stating it would make it seem. Imagine a solution that was open and allowed anybody to utilize its

Yes, and even this is a more complicated problem than simply stating it would make it seem. Imagine a solution that was open and allowed anybody to utilize its social graph. In theory this would allow other sites to build off the original and feed it back, maintaining equilibrium between every service. But in practice, this only holds until somebody decides to make a proprietary graph, because then users have nothing to gain by using any service other than the proprietary top level with the extra functionality. And why would we do something like that other than greed? Well, perhaps we want to implement some unique system that's not streamlined or practical, but which we need for a particular plan we have. So we create a system that contains that extra, proprietary data, which is proprietary because making it open would simply make every other service messy. Or perhaps it's that what we want to do would take too long to implement in an open solution, and we'd rather be advanced than be consistent. But the more we build on, the harder and harder it is to move back to that original openness. Similar to an environment like Flash, for instance, which lets developers implement functionality that's vastly beyond HTML (or, was vastly beyond, and still to some degree is), but which then ruins engines that rely on HTML's open format to work. Either you develop to be open, and sacrifice potential features, or you use something proprietary and lose that connection, and further place yourself in the hands of a third-party developer. There isn't a single optimal solution, unless you consider using multiple platforms an optimal solution. (Which I do. I don't feel frustrated at using four sites to monitor my various friends/feeds/updates. I just be careful to delineate all four so that each item appears in the right place, and so that my own updates get pushed to the right places.