Dreaming of a new social network

I've got an idea that I'll try to make coherent enough for someone else to get the gist of...

I want to be able to post photos, messages, and other personal stuff to a site that I pay for the hosting of, which can only be read by certain people. I'd like to offer them the ability to have their own accounts and do likewise. Bonus points for making it possible for them to download and move their stuff later if they so desire.

Facebook does most of these things, if you are willing to ignore all the downsides of being a resource for advertisers to mine, and governments to spy on, and hackers to breach, instead of being their customer.

I'm thinking of coding up something based on a bedrock of capability based security, with layers of filtering restricting authority on each layer to the user.

A private version of facebook, which can be shared... it shouldn't cost much... unless someone goes wild posting video and sucking up server space.  I'd guess $5/month or less.

What do you folks think?

The Medium is the Message...

cross-posted from a comment at facebook...

It used to be that people had their own published streams, and you could directly choose who to read (for example using RSS to keep tabs on what Scoble had to say).... but then the network effects of things like this got the better of us, and we're all here in a place where we have to either pay facebook for attention, or say something so outrageous that it goes viral to get around their paywall.

We need to go back to blogs to get the middlemen out, and tune our filters to the bigger, slower, and vastly more important real stories we need to pay attention to.

The medium (facebook) is the message...