Agree 100%. If history is any guide, major players will end up doing precisely that, eventually: setting up an industry-backed open consortium promoting some k

Agree 100%. If history is any guide, major players will end up doing precisely that, eventually: setting up an industry-backed open consortium promoting some kind of application-layer protocol/stack built around Diaspora or any its peers [1,2,3,4,5,6]. That plus another round of 2011-like Facebook fatigue could very well induce the required phase transition. Who knows though: perhaps newer, leaner companies like Dropbox or GitHub would be more likely to take the lead instead. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_prot... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tent_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tent_(protocol) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Social_Networking_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Social_Networking_... (Defunct, apparently) [3] http://www.gnu.org/software/social/ http://www.gnu.org/software/social/ (!) [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial (This MySpace-era protocol is interesting because it was initially supported by Google) [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus