Article in two sentences: "I believe the Internet today is highly fragmented and disassembled... Sooner or later the “Internet’s middleman” must emerge." [Frie

Article in two sentences: "I believe the Internet today is highly fragmented and disassembled... Sooner or later the “Internet’s middleman” must emerge." [FriendFeed, it could be you!] I feel like this is something else everyone knows, but I don't have a canonical document explaining it (like I do for why DRM is bad, http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt). Can anyone suggest one? Maybe Google's written up some stuff like this for OpenSocial? There is a very interesting incentive system for social networks and complete data transparency. Facebook et. al. only make ad money when you visit them, so it doesn't make financial sense for them to open up unless they expect to get more traffic from doing so then they lose. You might think that this means there's a market opportunity for a totally open social network, but to be useful it would first have to achieve critical mass in a crowded space. This makes me idly wonder whether the real solution is a social networking nonprofit (in the spirit of Wikipedia) where you store the canonical version of your data.