Have you heard of Diaspora yet? It's "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network". It's gotten a lot of support from people, pushing $200K as of this writing.

I'm not getting my hopes up too much, though; there is no product yet, only hope of one. And the way its supposed to work is by running a node on your machine to connect with other people -- a decentralized Facebook.

I wish them the best of luck and, in their defense, they had no way of thinking they would be getting this much attention. But let's face it: if using this means managing a node, then if managing the node isn't as simple as going to a web site and updating your status, people like my wife (who make up the vast majority of Facebook's users) are simply not going to use it.