oAuth was pioneered by Twitter and took off BECAUSE they had clout. I have seen FOAF, Personas and tons of other things fall by the wayside without adoption.
No matter how popular your protocol gets, it's still your protocol. I have no interest in it. I can go back to Twitter if I want to have my social connections locked into someone else's platform.
I have been burned by enough companies that play up open source and development ecosystems, then close up when it's no longer convenient. Your own example of Twitter was built on developers making tools for it. Who makes apps for Twitter now but marketing companies? Virtually no one.
Wordpress is used by 1/3 of all websites in the world.
Our thing is like Wordpress not Twitter.
So while it doesn’t currently support the latest protocol du jour (XMPP? FriendFeed? FOAF? ActivityPub? PubSubHubbub? Scuttlebutt?) it actually WORKS and people can use it to actually build apps today that are on par with what they get in Facebook.
Like I said if all we wanted was to have a microblog we would be done very soon. As it is that is 1% of the functionality you need for realtime collaboration, offline notifications etc.
You go make your thing. I'll keep enjoying the platform I'm on.
I guess I don’t understand your point ultimately. Just because YOU like something specific for your needs doesn’t mean there isn’t a large opportunity for something that addresses a totally different need.