Just in case, the full text:

These journalists, they got it all wrong, I tell ya. They’re waiting for a spectacle, where intrepid new entrepreneurs launch an insurgent website (bookface?) and the disaffected masses desert Facebook like rats on a sinking ship. The users are getting restless, that’s for sure, but nobody is sure about the next step.

And so article after article, blog after blog, the tech press looks for their savior. Who will be the next Mark Zuckerburg? Who will build a new empire with an historic trillion dollar valuation? Who is the David willing to challenge Goliath in a pay-per-view televised match to the death?

For a New York minute, it seemed as though Diaspora* was the perfect narrative: Young college students with a dream, the attention of the press and the support of the internet. They had a story, they had the gumption, and they had momentum. All they needed was code.

And therein, as the Bard would tell us, lies the rub: This is not a story of startups and entrepreneurs. This is not a story about who will become the next ~363kg gorilla. This is not a tale of who will next be crowned king.

This is a story about… Wait for it… Server-side software implementations and open, documented protocols.

It’s not easy to write an article about how there won’t be another Facebook. It’s more of a challenge to write an article about how Facebook will be brought down by an RPC or a REST API.

Facebook is a walled garden, and a walled garden is simply a proprietary system in a networked world. To understand how Facebook’s story ends, you have to understand how free software succeeds against it’s non-free competition. There has been some discussion about AOL and CompuServe as a historical precedence, but let’s try another one: Microsoft.

In the before times, in the long, long ago, Microsoft was a juggernaut. IBM before them, but they had won the belt, and wore it loudly. Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft. They had all kinds of ideas about how you would use your computer to search for information, and connect to the world. Very few of their ideas, however, were open.

Around that same time, a handful of developers few had heard of, with no major institutional funding or backing, began work on the Apache web server software. It was free of charge, open source (sorry, Richard, free software), and it worked well. Microsoft tried to compete with IIS, but they had to play by the rules set forth by Apache, which was open protocols in an open web.

Many started hearing about the web, but who heard about Apache? Only those who needed to. It was a quiet revolution, with little attention from the mainstream tech press, and to this day, few users of the web know what Apache is. And yet, Apache served almost 67% of the busiest websites in the world.

Other examples are Joomla! and Drupal, two content management systems that power millions of website. Yet most users have no idea what they are. They don’t have to. They displaced proprietary systems without a dot-com launch party. Another quiet revolution.

Social networking is following these templates. An open, free alternative being built today will quietly replace the walled gardens. Starting with niche communities, building up to institutions like schools and employers, and eventually someone will build a popular hub that gets some press and is touted as the next big thing, although by that point, the “next big thing” will mean something completely different.

At some point, Facebook will decide that they will have to play along, and connect into a decentralized, open social network. Many Facebook users will barely know this has happened, only that some of their friends on their network don’t have an @facebook.com in their profile. Facebook won’t ever die out, but they will have to operate in an eco-system as a player amongst many, respecting open standards, and supporting the open social web, even if they’d rather not.

And that’s when we’ve won.