[junto]

I have previously thought about a similar idea, where we have a standard for a social media stream. People can pick lots of different social media hosting companies. You tap in your social media updates and your hosting company hosts that stream.

You tell your friends your social media URL and they add it to their social media client. If your browser had a client, then it would be responsible for merging all of those feeds into one news feed (just like Facebook's). The important thing here is that everything can be decentralized. It is a bit like merged RSS feeds.

Of course a majority of people would hand that responsibility over to a social media hosting company (such as Facebook), but if you really wanted to, you could write your own client, or hook it directly into your website.

Everything would be secure by default.

[forteller]

That sounds exactly like the idea behind federated social networks. I've blogged about that in my post 'Think like the internet – Or how to fight Facebook, and win" http://blogg.forteller.net/2011/think-internet/