I made a comment on the (Facebook) -> (Social Networking Microsoft) possiblity a few days ago on a similar thread that was up here. I believe at this point only pmarca and Ning have a decent shot at saving us from this nightmare. On the other hand if someone could throw together an open-platform API for social info sharing, this could prevent Facebook from locking up the market.<p>If no one is able to do this in the next six months, it is going to be a long hard messy few years for social networking, esp. since Facebook places your data behind lock and key. That will be a lot of unrecoverable data after three or four more years.<p>Any one want to form a startup to challenge Facebook? I'd love to take on Zuckerburgler.<p>