The big thing in replacing Facebook isn't "distributed" or "central", its "what could make people switch?" Facebook came to prominence because of the elitist factor associated with top schools, the "poke" concept and its lack of "cesspool-edness" compared with MySpace.
At this point, I personally don't see how you could compete with Facebook on functionality, so what is your 10x improvement that would make people switch from Facebook to your new thing? People don't seem to be outraged enough about the privacy debacles as of yet to be making enough noise that a competitor could capture a large share just from that issue alone. (e.g. this is likely why Diaspora will fail, at least initially)
Knocking Facebook out of its top spot is much more of a economics (i.e. incentives, etc) and marketing issue than a technical one, IMO. People won't switch to a me-too; there has to be some compelling reason to move.
At this point, I personally don't see how you could compete with Facebook on functionality, so what is your 10x improvement that would make people switch from Facebook to your new thing? People don't seem to be outraged enough about the privacy debacles as of yet to be making enough noise that a competitor could capture a large share just from that issue alone. (e.g. this is likely why Diaspora will fail, at least initially)
Knocking Facebook out of its top spot is much more of a economics (i.e. incentives, etc) and marketing issue than a technical one, IMO. People won't switch to a me-too; there has to be some compelling reason to move.