No way is it too late to turn back. There is definitely a positive feedback loop involved, but I think we have an ecosystem too tuned to potential monopolies to

No way is it too late to turn back. There is definitely a positive feedback loop involved, but I think we have an ecosystem too tuned to potential monopolies to allow this to happen without a fight. Instead, I think we'll see social networking layer across websites generally: imagine using opensocial/oauth over multiple sites that you use, as if you could bolt Ning.com over the top of you blog or forum or startup site. I tested out adding Google's friend connect on my wordpress personal blog. Fairly simple, but they still collect the data :( I guess a duopoly is better than a monopoly, but there's still room for web identity to develop outside of Facebook.