I thought I would start a thread here regarding Will's post over at DNN.com of the same name.

I would have started a thread on DNN.com but so few people go there anymore I didn't want to waste my time.

Will's blog poses a very good question - especially for certain types of sites.  If your DNN social site is based on a special interest, which I think the majority are, then I think it's great to work with FB and use FB to lure visitors to your site. But if you have a location based DNN social site then the answer isn't so clear cut.

For instance, I'm building a location based site - since it is location specific and members must be citizens of the towns the site serves it makes sense for members to use FB for their "I just want to reconnect with former classmates" type of national networking. But at the same time I see a major marketing advantage by providing a social networking environment that respects members privacy and is free from all of the tracking, monitoring, archiving, etc.  I think a great number of people would love to have social networking tools that respect their privacy and I think DNN is capable of providing that to them.

So my latest thought is to make profiles on my location based site more of a "white pages on steroids" where most everything on a member's profile is "public"  (available to other people in the specific community).  Those local profiles then have links to FB OR a regional / national DNN based site which offers social networking that respects your privacy.

Steven and I have talked about this before - it would be really cool to build a system where each person could have their own DNN based (or some other "lessor" brand) website that could be hosted where ever the owner wants. This would then connect to a national central profile directory.  This would enable people to have simple one page profiles all the way up to a "personal portal" that offers DropBox type features (again, without the privacy intrusion), a DNN RSS "reader" (without the tracking that Google Reader does), private email (instead of tracked and monitored gmail), etc. etc.  This would also solve the problem that Will speaks of in his blog post of needing 30,000 servers.

Just some thoughts - hoping for some opinions.