My dream is yours: I want a platform where all those ideas can be implemented.
We can build an open platform to represent social profiles, the relationships between them, and the actions on those relationships (e.g. “trash this connection”). Having a platform like Facebook’s is amazing; if we had something like that, just open (and more focused on how we humans structure our real-life relationships), that would not mean “being tied down” but “having a solid framework to build dream apps on top of.”
Facebook and Twitter and Google and Microsoft and Pinterest and all the others have no reason to share their databases: it cost them a lot to compile and maintain, and they compete against each other. If we don’t have a common platform, then developers will have to make their own, and there we are, with incompatible social networks (not because of competition, but because people will need to keep reinventing the wheel.)
Without a common platform, you will have a SafeSkype account and a SafePress account and a SafeAlbums account: you may log in to them with the same ID, but that’s where it stops. You’ll have separate sets of relationships in each, some will have groups, others will not, some will do access control this way, the other another way, etc.
Facebook got big when it allowed developers to build applications where users could use their existing relationships instead of having to start from scratch every time (and also learn another apps idiosyncrasies about what is the right way to do the social networking thing.)
If you want to trash a Skype connection, you probably want to trash all your connections with that person. Why should you go through all your different apps to look for all the instances you connected with that person? I don’t wanna maintain 25 separate address books / friend lists, all with differently structured groups and sharing settings.
If the social network is a separate layer on top of the core login id layer, you can manage the relationships on their own right, decoupled from the applications you use. I can just click on this shiny new app, and it has all my friends / groups / relationships in it, and when I share something, I know exactly who will see what. That’s the idea.