> Are there any technical reasons why the old finger / .plan system couldn't be revived to replace facebook, twitter, etc, with an open and simple social networ

> Are there any technical reasons why the old finger / .plan system couldn't be revived to replace facebook, twitter, etc, with an open and simple social network? People have tried that and failed. The technical reason appears to be "UI/UX/average person/etc. issues", whatever you want to call them these days. Average social network users seem to want a unified system which distributed platforms have a hard time providing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network