People don't seem to be aware that many, many people and projects have been working on Open Web solutions to this problem. See OStatus: http://ostatus.org/ and http://status.net/wiki/OStatus/Interop

Please don't leave out StatusNet. http://status.net/ and OStatus http://ostatus.org/ IRC: #statusnet on freenode It's an AGPL social networking platform, complete with a federated message bus built on Open Web standards that anyone can install and run on his/her own server or commodity hosting setup. No, it's not a 100% perfect replacement for Facebook as it stands (although a pretty good replacement for Twitter). But it could be. Why not build on the two years of work that's gone into it, instead of starting over from scratch, or trying to bolt on federation to a piece of software that was never designed to be distributed. The constant reinventing of the wheel is frustrating.