Keep the good of Facebook, throw out the bad, replace it with better.<p>The good: Connection to and updates from long-unseen friends, family and acquaintances; community organizing; universality.<p>The bad: Placing our thoughts, ideas, memories, pictures, opinions and habits into a closed, for-profit ecosystem with dubious ethics and the tendency to meddle with the presentation of that content (and the content itself) like a scolding, self-serving parent. Opaque content curation designed, at best, to maximize advertising revenue.<p>Better: Placing the above in the hands of individual users: self presentation, feed curation entirely under user control.<p>Existing technologies such as RSS, open IDs and authentication, blogging software, etc, can, glued together with the right protocol TBD, to allow individuals to have more control over their own data and identity, while still allowing all of the good that Facebook and other social media actually bring to the world. Individuals host their own equivalent of the "Facebook wall" (or hire a host), and can subscribe to other "walls". Posting on your "wall" can have different levels of security - available to trusted audience or public, rather like Facebook is. Only, the user owns it. A free, open-source protocol that emphasizes interoperability and user control would allow devs to create any kind of client that suits them.<p>Revenue through consultation and marketing the deep expertise that comes from knowing the protocol inside out.