ARPA2 phase 4: SocialHub

The SocialHub phase turns the Internet as a whole into a social network. This is not a new idea in itself, but we have gotten used to thinking social services are web-based and, as a result, located with a more-or-less central provider. This model has shown to be detrimental to our control over online presence and privacy, so we turn it around. Nobody minds a web interface, but the heart of social networking should just be... networking. And by that, we mean at the level of the general Internet Protocol, where everyone is an equal.

This is the first phase of ARPA2, and it is targeted at letting people build social networks, in which they can exchange snippets of information in a variety of ways, either over peer-to-peer communication or using more classical mechanisms, but always founded on open protocols and/or open standards.