[32qwef]

There should be, I agree. The best features of facebook are events, and friend recommendations. It would be great if we had an open standard for the social graph, and then other companies could make services like events or friend discovery, and you could pick and choose which ones you subscribed to.

As for authentication, thankfully most sites let you register an account with them. It's a little inconvenient, but with a password manager it's simple. Still, I wish OpenID was more widespread.