[VladRussian2]

well, the new frontier is "dark mail" or more generally "dark net" where interoperability again is the key [as the only way to grow. It is like natural evolution - any non-interoperability efforts will just not grow, and only an interoperability based effort will produce the critical mass]. It is organically decentralized and by its nature a user is the owner of its data even though actual [meaningless to 3rd party] bits may be stored by one or spread around multiple distributed providers ("dark money" style as if you BT wallet is encrypted and replicated though the BT network itself). Content mining and "user is the product", and thus FB and Google as we know it, would be for some time problematic at best and it will be some time before segmentation era of the new net dawns and new Serge/Larry/Zuckenberg appear :)

[dspillett]

But it isn't an empty frontier that the thinkers/developers are entering alone. The existing problems both commercial and legal (and not-quite-so-legal-but-state-funded-so-good-luck-fighting-that-one) will be so close behind to stop/exploit/both as to make the exploration very inconvenient. I'm not saying it can't happen, but it won't happen organically over a period of time like email did.