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Comment by hans | Hacker News Reader

Some day... that federated social networking channel will sprout up... and each person can host their own identity and friends and silly wall posts on the home workstation. Then we can forget about all the ad spam corporations attempting to jack our shxt.

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Who would own/host a conversation between you and friend X, you or X? Who would have the right to "delete" it? The point of a social graph is that all the useful information exists on the edges, not at the vertices.

Sure, but if you think about it, you can host yourself as a vertice with all these incoming / outgoing / directed or not associations and any available number of key/value stores or open graphs for shared data, which could be negotiated as needed. Services might crop up to provide this. It doesn't have to be all users under 1 roof for the entire internet.

And this fB open graph nonsense ... you'd have your own property sheet(s) of namespaced attributes (or semantic triples) and websites can negotiate with you for access. Ultimately no corporation would be able to dictate how your data store can be used. Legally it would be your own data domain from the ground up. Checkout VRM ...

The same person that own and/or host your email to that person: namely, you and they, and the providers you choose (which may be yourselves).

I think a lot of the reason people like posting on someone's wall on Facebook, as opposed to mailing them, is that they truly can take back a wall post after it has been submitted and delivered. This is only possible with a "benevolent messenger," an authority between you and the other party that can be biased in your interest. People don't like truly impartial records, although they like to look like they do.

Who owns email? Nobody.

I thought about a p2p social networking where each person can host their own data (like you mentioned). Then I checked out Opera Unite. The concept and possibilities are neat. But in practice they ended up way too slow. Maybe in the near future, we can have that.

Isn't that called "having a blog"?

This BTW would be the ultimate form of rebellion ...

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