Cameron Moll:

While I’d love to see Facebook lose its AOL-in-the-90s grip on the web, Ryan’s vision of an open alternative is nothing more than a pipe dream, I’m afraid. About the only “open” anything gaining traction these days — despite all the hype and chatter about open over the past decade — is HTML5.

And, as someone pointed out in the comments, the real irony of this argument is the Facebook “Like” button at the end of the article.

I’d agree with Moll that it’s unlikely a free-and-open alternative will supplant Facebook. Singel’s suggestion of using “Posterous [or similar] to build a profile page in the style of your liking. You’d get to control what unknown people get to see, while the people you befriend see a different, more intimate page” is a nice dream, but woefully unrealistic because it fails the hackneyed “Mother Test”; Facebook (and MySpace, Bebo, et al before it) is successful precisely because it’s easy and requires almost nothing in the way of technical know-how or expertise to use. That’s the reason that there are over 9,000 million people using Facebook. (I’m ignoring, for now, the snowball effect of everyone you know already being on it which acts as an incentive to use it in the first place.)

“Social networking” (puke) sites are finally reaching something approaching maturity, and it looks like Facebook is poised to become the Windows of social networks — hugely flawed, run by a company that’s terribly far from perfect, but what people ultimately stick with because it’s familiar.

Also, kudos to Wired for choosing possibly the sleaziest looking picture of Zuckerberg ever.