Last week, Facebook announced that it had amassed 500 million users, a formable portion of the global Internet audience. But even as Mark Zuckerberg and company celebrates, others are busy trying to uproot Facebook's popularity by establishing a set of open standards to share Facebook-like features across the Internet.

Just like open standards for e-mail and the Web broke users free from proprietary closed networks of the early 1990s, so too could a new set of standards allow people to share their thoughts, photos and comments across the Internet, regardless of what social networking services they use, argued Evan Prodromou, head of open source microblogging software provider StatusNet, during the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), held in Portland, Oregon last week.

More: http://www.pcworld.com/article/202089/

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