What are the alternatives, effectively? All I want is: - a profile page where I can post something personal - comments to the posts so that my friends can sh

What are the alternatives, effectively? All I want is: - a profile page where I can post something personal - comments to the posts so that my friends can share what they felt - sort of a like button or flag to let friends mark posts they like And maybe these are pretty useful as well: - ability to post links and images - ability to create topic specific groups and invite friends there to discuss things - ability to create events and invite people there for rsvp And last, the must-have feature: - my friends are there, also the non-technical ones While the first items are technically easy (Google+ could do it!), Facebook is winning on the last entry. I don't particularly like Facebook but keeping in touch with friends using email just doesn't work either anymore. Some people don't even have email. Personally, I either make a phonecall or text if it's a close friend, or write nice comments on Facebook if it's a not so close friend. To free ourselves from the shackles of vendor lock-in, a generic social media protocol similar to email should emerge at some point. It shouldn't matter if I'm on Google+ and you're on the Facebook: if we're connected we're connected and the protocol translates the news between the two implementations.