We need to rethink what social is and needs to be on the web. People are unwilling to pay for these services, yet spend hours on them every day. This is a big issue. People are unwilling to pay for the servers, and engineers, yet become frantic when they learn that indeed FB wasn’t as free as they thought.
So that’s issue number one. If you are unwilling to pay with your privacy, pay with your wallet. Right now, there is very little willingness from the people to pay for the services they use, but once newspapers start charging, and information on the web in general start to cost money, that’s when we can rethink the product.