[seankean]

Here's a try for some discussion. It seems like there actually is a great potential to try totally novel ways of approaching physically distributed networking and then developing services on such a network that use protocols for adding social applications that are not centralized.

If an app on people's phones could act as an always-on part of the distributed network that could be one component - another would be for small boxes to be attached to your home Internet router that are always on also acting as a part of the network. Individuals could have a personal filestore of message posts and photos that they perceive as just being available 'in the cloud' like facebook - but are actually stored in redundant chunks throughout an array of these mobile and stationary nodes that not only they own, but as well shared on their close friends and family's nodes.

For the static nodes connected to a router it could be a $35 raspberry pi + plan 9 operating system + tent.io protocol server - for mobile it's your iPhone/android running an app (perhaps plan 9/ inferno as a virtual machine( that uses local storage and acts as a client and server. Together with many of these nodes -- imagine at least one for everyone if the billion Facebook users --- and you'd have a new "meshwork" grid for decentralized (social) networking applications.