Re: Alternative to Facebook
@jackreichert-
If you are asking where to start in helping turn WP / BP into a distributed social networking platform, I cannot say. That is currently not in the works. It would require a major rewriting of WordPress’ foundational core. If you are asking about the project I reference in my post, then it’s best to email me separately as that is beyond scope for the BuddyPress forums.
But, there may be a middle ground. A few of us are in the beginning stages of thinking about semantifying BuddyPress with the possible goal of enabling BP to use WebIDs as an alternative to OpenID, and to encode other semantic markup to enable BP networks to join the growing number of Linked Data applications.