Let's say you built a distributed social network where you can add plugins to communicate via different protocols... And one of them happen to know how to interact with Facebooks APIs or website, so that you would not need to care whether your contacts are facebook users or non facebook users.
The same way we have IM clients that can talk multiple protocols.
Facebook almost certainly would try to shut it down if it got any kind of traction, because the set of people you could interact with on this new platform would be a strict superset of Facebook users. It'd be bound to have clunky usability issues (e.g. group communication would be hard to get right with groups split across platforms), but it'd enable users to start extracting themselves from Facebook more and more if/when more of their friends decide to try it out.
I'd love to see someone try. I won't try myself for two reasons: I don't use Facebook enough to know what features would be necessary, and secondly it's likely to be a game of cat and mouse with Facebook both technically and legally.
I totally agree with the concept of "gateway". Kind of like a social protocol similar to SMTP(which is for emails), by which Facebook/G+/<some-new-player> inter-operate. That's the best solution and the only solution to fix this situation.
If needed, Facebook must be forced to open up. Its a wrong kind of monopoly.
>I'd love to see someone try. I won't try myself for two reasons: I don't use Facebook enough to know what features would be necessary, and secondly it's likely to be a game of cat and mouse with Facebook both technically and legally.
SMTP protocol[1] is created and maintained by IETF. Ditto for social. I wonder why don't Google, who didn't succeed with G+, submit a 'social' protocol already to IETF.
