Building a distributed social network

Something that everyone and his dog have been into on the internet these past couple of years has been social networking and the whole "Web 2.0" thing. There are problems with how it currently works, however. Today, everyone goes to social network portals, such as MySpace or Facebook, and while this may be easier for the less technically apt, it's pretty annoying when everyone's trying to get you to use this or that "app" for your portal of choice.

I've heard about distributed social networking; the idea as I see it is that a person with a website consumes and provides features that allow for the same sharing of data as seen in the portal-style sites, but uses his or her own website instead. So I can see updates on Rob and Sacha through my own site in a way that I want to see the updates, rather than through some third party site with a train wreck of a design. (I'm looking at you, Facebook!)

What I see as distributed social networking and what online company YouChoose calls the same, are not exactly the same thing. YouChoose seems to be providing some kind of "push" technology that again, goes through their own walled garden, and then is sent out to all the major social networks on which a user has a profile. My idea doesn't even really bother with the social network sites; rather each user keeps his or her profile on their own site, and provides both push and pull technology to send and obtain updates, probably through something like SOAP or XML-RPC. Common services (some to be defined; others possibly including current online services like Disqus, etc.) allow interaction between users.

As you can guess, the idea in my head is still somewhat nebulous; I know what I want, but going from grand idea to implementation will take some time and some smarter brains than mine. It'd be great to be able to break away from the old fashioned social networks, though, and be able to provide my profile and "apps" through my own site, or on occasion through other online services.