Social networking is at a crossroads. The choice is between the ease of use and ubiquity of commercial services such as myspace, facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter, and the desire to use a tool for social interactions that is not subject to the decisions of an anonymous board of directors of some for-profit company, to being sold to the highest bidder or to just simply ceasing to operate.

While the commercial providers of networking space are doing everything to make life easy and to make interaction fun and interesting, there are drawbacks that we need to consider.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, in his article

Is a Perfect Storm Forming for Distributed Social Networking?

brings some of those issues to our attention.

Twitter went down again today, possibly for the second time in two weeks because of a Distributed Denial of Service attack. A swarm of zombified computers, distributed all around the world, is hitting Twitter’s centralized infrastructure over and over again until it can’t stay up.

If we all had a little piece of our microblogging network on our own servers and they spoke to each other, that couldn’t happen.

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Social activity stream discussion network FriendFeed announced that it was selling itself to Facebook yesterday and many of its users were very upset. The acquisition is likely to change Facebook in interesting ways (FriendFeed’s creators were the inventors of GMail and Google Maps) but FriendFeed itself was important to its users.

The feeling of betrayal that comes from a transaction like this makes it hard to trust a hosted social networking company again.

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The alternative would be, according to Kirkpatrick, “a distributed, interoperable, self-hosted network of publishing, reading and discussion tools”. Something that can run on our own computers, giving us the same functionality that today’s best hosted services provide, except it should be open source and not subject to anyone’s whim or control.

This would appear to be a perfect time for building a block-buster open source p2p social networking tool and I am sure efforts are underway.

Please share any insights on what is happening along these lines out there.