What possible benefit would it give companies whose entire business value revolves around their data...to just give that data away to anyone?
Here's what I learned from working on the DIASPORA* project: The only people that federated/distributed social networking benefits are the 1% of nerds who know how to use it. Everyone else is hopelessly, and willingly, attached at the hip to their social network of choice. Most of the issues or feature requests fell into the following two categories:
1.) I need $FEATURE otherwise I can't use DIASPORA* at all. 2.) Why doesn't $FEATURE in DIASPORA* work like /Facebook|Twitter|Google/? If we made it work exactly like that, regardless of the fact that it makes no sense on a distributed network, we'd be able to actually compete with a $100bil social network! Wow!
Both of these are pipe dreams. With #1, the person is convincing themselves that they want to use D*, but in reality they just want Facebook without Facebook actually owning their data. #2 is the notion that a company like Facebook or Google, who both simultaneously and independently got rid of the last remaining "interoperable standard" in their business: XMPP. Yes, XMPP...once the golden boy of federated discussion platforms...has been totally deprecated by the top two implementors.
Why? Because building their own, centralized IM service is not only more lucrative, it's also a lot easier and less expensive.
The fact that anyone actually sat down and took the time to build specs for federated social networking is a miracle to me...considering there's practically zero business value in it.