Friend of a Friend: The Facebook That Could Have Been Why didn't the FOAF
standard give us distributed social networking in the 2000s? twobithistory.org
FOAF’s failure to take off demonstrates that people have never valued control
very highly. As one blogger has put it, “‘Users want to own their own data’ is
an ideology, not a use case.”10 If users do not value control enough to stomach
additional complexity, and if centralized systems are more simple than
distributed ones—and if, further, centralized systems tend to be closed and thus
the successful ones enjoy powerful network effects—then social networks are
indeed natural monopolies.
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