Take email as an example, if basic mail delivery wasn't severely broken, due to dynamic ip addresses, lack of convenient encryption, spam and overall security c

Take email as an example, if basic mail delivery wasn't severely broken, due to dynamic ip addresses, lack of convenient encryption, spam and overall security concerns it would be extremely easy to self host everything related to email yourself, at least in principle. Want to follow Lady GAGA? Just subscribe to a mailing list. Some of the mechanisms of Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook can easily be mapped to an email like protocol. Friend requests correspond to whitelisting or a special filter on the mails you receive, same goes for "Circles". Hashtags would similarly correspond to potentially dynamic mailing lists, that could be hosted by basically anyone and indexed by a separate service. To publish something on "your wall" just send an email to a mailing list you control, to make a post "private" just encrypt it using the public key of your indented recipients, etc. The problem with todays services is that they don't rely on a publicly defined protocol and essentially dumb if somewhat elaborate implementation of that protocol, but instead offer a public "open" API to a service that is proprietary. Also too many people are probably caught up in thinking about the web only in terms of http and neglect to think about the possibilities of services that don't fit neatly in that framework. Especially convenient save encryption is not implementable in the browser without plugins at the moment, as far as I can see.