http://twitter.com/#!/flipzagging/status/16766878672228352
Diaspora is a sad story: a team with great intentions but little systems experience, becoming the standard-bearer for distributed social networking. They gained attention from some random factors (frustration with Facebook at a peak, NYtimes story, Kickstarter).
I think the odds of there being a single winner-take-all provider of social networking services (SNS), forever and ever, are slight. The idea that kids are going to stick with the SNS their mom uses to play Farmville seems ridiculous to me. So we should see some amount of fragmentation, eventually.
It also seems absurd to me that Facebook will remain agile enough to shut out competitors while also supporting 500M+ users. At some point, a situation should arise where competitor SNS services will find it to their advantage to be interoperable. That could end in an oligopoly, but that still counts as a more distributed social network.
Larry Page often likes to say "don't bet against the internet". And I am old enough to remember when people thought that Microsoft's Project Blackbird was going to kill the web. I am confident that SNS, like almost all internet services, will be commodified at some point, and probably sooner than we expect.
Caveat: this hasn't quite worked out for instant messaging, so I could be wrong.