With no major corporate ties it looks like these guys have free reign to design without the need for the kind of fief protection that's hampered initiatives like OpenID. How optimistic are you that they'll be successful? Are we looking at the beginning of the end of Facebook?
I don't think so for several reasons
1) While nerds are upset over Facebook most people are not. There would need to be a compelling reason for these people to sign up and I don't think privacy is enough for most people.
2) They don't seem to be that focused on being user friendly and how a typical end user can use their service
3) Distributed systems in an uncontrolled environment are slower and more error prone which will make it less user friendly.
4) How am I going to keep track of what hundreds of my friends are up to? Am I going to have to connect to hundreds of nodes to pull updates. Or is my node going to have to connect to hundreds of nodes to push updates?
90% Chance they will build something useful.
10% Chance it will be adopted by "Us".
.00001% Chance it will be the end of Facebook.