What I’d like to see is an outfit that creates a totally open social network system, which can be used freely but with certain functions limited (e.g., only X number of API usages per day), and with a for-pay version that has no limits. The problem is, the only folks I see having enough juice to pull together something like that would be more inclined to just make it a walled garden and monetize it that way.

Had a discussion with one friend on Facebook, who said he likes Facebook as a “one stop shop” rather than keep track of dozens of different forums and blogs.

What I’d love to see is an ecosystem of different web services which do one thing and do them well, be it photo sharing, blogging, conversation spaces or one-stop content aggregation, all talking to each other via open APIs and standards like RSS rather than trying to established independent walled gardens. That way there would be genuine competion on user experience and ads vs. subscriptions between them.

In an interview with another tech maven — a 15-year vet of Microsoft — he noted that people change phones very easily. Because there’s so little genuine competition between social networks, and so little portability, there’s no incentive to jump ship.

See my rant about “seven telephones” for more on that score: http://www.genjipress.com/2012/12/antisocial-networking-dept.html