@Blindsite2k I like your thoughts on this. If we think about what MaidSafe’s strengths are and build things around those, we might end up with something a lot diff/better than just cloning another social network platform.
Take this Discourse forum; it is in fact a form of social network, albeit a topic-first social network but a social network non-the-less. Think of all the really nice features of this forum app. There is a ton of stuff here and I think it’s an awesome tool. One that I would not want to reinvent if we didn’t have to. When I think of cloning/developing a system like this I start thinking of how many dev hours it would take and my head starts swimming. Is there a way for current web apps to back into the MaidSafe network? I’m sure if an app was developed well (separation of concerns, nice layering, etc.) the database could be swapped out for the DHT, authentication could use self-auth and so on. If there is not, we should think about how to make it possible so good apps that already exist can join the party easily. In fact I could see a real business model forming here that would just be around being experts in helping existing platforms migrate and/or expand. Perhaps this should be a start of a new topic under development, but let’s continue.
Now think of fb or twitter and why they exist. fb is a friend-first network. Twitter and maybe G+ could be categorized as @happybeing said, content-dissemination networks. I too was involved when G+ first came on the scene and I’m not thrilled with it.
So let’s think about what we want/need and go from there. How do we want to use it, vs. cloning other social networks… Just my 0.00003776 BTC.