I love flow, so there's a temptation to put a Facebook "Like" button on every Scripting News story, but I'm resisting the temptation for the same reason I never used Feedburner to host my RSS feeds. They were offering a benefit, but I didn't want to cede all that power to them or trust them not to sell out to a big company that I don't trust. Or (as with Facebook and Google) be a company that I don't trust.  

So perhaps there's a compromise? Let me implement my own Like feature and have it connect up to Facebook through a feed. And let it connect up to Facebook's competitors just as easily. I'm sure the smart guys at Facebook could figure out how to do this, perhaps they already have? I'm willing to do a little extra work to keep the web independent of any one company. 

Update: Facebook is trying to be more than the identity system for the web. They are trying to be the identity system for everything. There's no limit because they've (correctly) understood that the web can and in many ways does model our reality. Yelp has pages that represent restaurants. IMDB pages rep movies. None of these things had identity until now. Which leads to the second update. 

Update: You gotta wonder if this is enough to shake both Google and Twitter from their megalomania. In retrospect, what a mistake it was for Twitter to get so aggressive with developers last week. Had they realized how cornered they were, they would have gone the other way, surrendered to the developers, completely and unconditionally, even begged for terms. "How can we all work together to keep what we need to be open, open?" I haven't heard anything from Google in the last few years that wasn't utterly menacing. Let's see if they can quickly learn how to get along with creative people who don't work at big tech companies.