Instead of uploading all our information to silos like Facebook or Twitter, we should be able to host our own basic (meta)data like avatar, status updates or social connections in a standardized format.
You would then be able to grant services like Facebook or Twitter access to that data via a token, and you could control which service gets access to what kind of data.
Yes, I'm still dreaming of a semantic web.
@fribbledom If everybody hosts their own personal social network, what would anybody need a Facebook or a Twitter for?
@fribbledom Most of that seems like it could be pretty thin wrappers/adapters and there are indeed some neat possibilities for hooking all sorts of stuff into that. The gaming use case is compelling, but I think the easier it is to self-host as much as possible, the more control everybody has over their own experience. I remember when networked multiplayer was modems or LANs. Those games still work in contrast to too many examples where someone else controls the servers that got shut down.
@neal
You're not going to host the entire social network yourself, you're merely hosting your profile data and social connections.
There are a lot of features that can still be built on top of that: chats, sharing of various media types, games, anything you can think of, really.