@mkice: Please email me (echelon@gmail.com). I've got a massive engineering project that I've been working on for some years, and I definitely need help on it due to my busy education schedule. It's along the same lines of Diaspora, but a much broader scope: give all data a decentralized, ontological API and a node-based exchange platform.

I've taken some ideas from the Semantic Web community, but scaled them down so they're practical. I use a subset of RDF that maps cleanly to an SQL/ORM. Models are generative based on the ontologies you define. Types are hierarchical "Resources" that are uniquely identified (and sometimes dereferenceable) by URI and can be exchanged from the original source or via a p2p mechanism.

If this or any similar platform gains traction, Facebook is history. Blogs are history. Reddit, etc. -- it can all be emulated (and improved) on this platform and everyone can write code for it. No more data silos.

Personally, I'm not so interested in the social networking aspect, but social network tools can be built upon this. I'm more interested in creating a tool to route interesting information to and from relevant parties. I want an optimal web reading experience, and not even hacker news can provide this. (ie. I want to algorithmically find peers with similar skills/interests and fetch their highly-ranked stories/comments, data mine, personal interest profiling, etc. Can't do that without success/adoption of the platform though.)