[Eric_WVGG]

Badly. Most non-techies I talk to would rather “find you on Facebook.”

This was largely behind the relative failure of RSS, in my opinion, even more than the Google Reader debacle. Various friends and family still ask me how I keep informed, I show them Reeder for iPad and they immediately want to get on board; then I explain how you go around to the news sources you like and gather feeds or use a bookmarklet and their eyes glaze over.

I hope this brainstorming on a distributed/federated social network goes somewhere, but if the creators don’t even bother considering why Facebook worked in the first place, their efforts are doomed.