We could easily have a distributed web search engine to replace google. It could run on everyones machine, and it'd be awesome. But what would be the advantage?
Also before twitter/facebook, we had email - a distributed social network. How is the "new" distributed social network going to be better than email?
That's not to say it was easy to make Facebook succeed, or that it would be impossible to make a service outcompete Facebook now. But it was certainly far easier to unseat the king back then than it is now.
"Easily?" Distributing things is hard. The claims of those who don't know this are to be treated with skepticism.
> It could run on everyones machine, and it'd be awesome.
Until we get something like "Trusted Computing," there will be a few people who will run servers that "cheat" somehow. This has been true for distributed systems over the Internet for over 3 decades now. (SMTP, Gnutella, Bittorrent, just to name a few.)
Imagine you cannot use a word document created in windows cannot be used in linux or mac. Imagine YOU need to use windows just because other people use. Will this be good?
Choice of operating system is upto you and you must be able to exchange data across operating systems. That "interoperability" is needed for any good system. You don't need interoperability only if you want to monopolize the market.
I'd like to hear more about that. An easy to build distributed system able to take the same computing/network load of google? Man, that would be awesome.
This page (http://searchengineland.com/by-the-numbers-twitter-vs-facebo...) claims that google search handles 34k requests per second.
I'm yet to see someone describing how you can easily create something completely descentralized that is able to achieve such a high performance.
And I'm talking only about speed. If you throw other issues like quality of results, privacy, dependability, how to get traction, and so on, the thing becomes insanely difficult.
If it was so easy to do this kind of stuff, someone would already have done it.