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Basically, I believe it will be much harder for a competitor to reach the same capital as Google or Facebook.

Google and Facebook have massive networks, specialized storage strategies, proprietary protocols and hardware, and not to forget the actual data they have acquired. Lots of hard-to-acquire capital.

On the other hand, I do believe that both products could be better. Competitors could have better products, but not for a long time more capital.

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I think Google and Facebook will face the same enemy that Microsoft faced back in the 1990s - the nameless and faceless, Open Source!

Maybe, if FOSS can build a self-syncing co-operating network spanning multiple nodes across the globe, they can solve the infrastructure/data-storage problem (we already have two precedents here, namely Bitcoin and Bittorrent networks).

Finally, if FOSS can also convince a good proportion of masses to crowdsource their efforts, they would have solved the data acquisition problem too!

>self-syncing co-operating network spanning multiple nodes across the globe

It's already there, see http://yacy.net/en/index.html.

The idea is great and I wish them good luck. But, unfortunately, it isn't usable yet IMO.

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