As much as I would love to use and have a network like this, until all the people I keep in touch with through facebook use it, I'll still have a facebook.
I wonder if it's plausible, even possible, to have all those p2p benefits (encryption, authentication, privacy) and some how also have interoperability with facebook?
FB and Twitter have APIs. Of course, they can revoke your key. But they have web clients, so they can be scraped.
Faced with a genuinely distributed opponent, there's no way the existing behemoths can keep your data in their silos.
For instance, FB can block tent.is at the API level or even at the IP level. But if Tent hosts pop up all around the internets, and if they are general-purpose enough that users can install their own scraping gateways, which can't be attacked centrally using technical or legal means... it's game over. To me this is one of the less recognized advantages of a distributed service.
Maxim.
1.) Go to web page and use application, or 2.) Download app and use application
This is how Facebook / Twitter / etc. do it., and they're clearly doing it right. But there's no law which says that the application needs to keep its data on a third-party server. Why not have it run a Peer-to-peer service?
In fact, I think that Peer-to-peer is especially suitable to social networking, given that social networks are typically highly clustered (eg., people who are my friends are much more likely to be each others' friends as well). This means that if the every client application is able to redistribute copies of friends' status updates as well as its own status updates, then a sync between any given pair of clients is likely to allow them to bring a large subset of their friends' statuses up to date.
Of course if you're rebroadcasting your friends' status updates as a P2P host, then the question of spoofing/authentication becomes paramount. Obviously that would have to be solved by having all status updates transmitted in encrypted formats which can only be decrypted / authenticated with a users' public key.
Oh, and once you've got dual-key authentication embedded in widely-used social trust networks, you could probably solve a lot of other authentication problems while you're at it.
All of this would need to be completely transparent to the user, of course. If it's any more difficult to set up and use than standard Facebook / Twitter, it will fail. But I don't see any fundamental obstacles to making it that easy.
Unfortunately I don't have time to do anything about this!