Get on RespectNetwork and get your XRI name.

Just a little motivation for getting involved with RespectNetwork and grabbing one of their "cloud names" (ie. an XRI) at their great one-time price of $25:

For a while there, I was playing with the APIs for "unhosted" and P2P apps quite a bit, just doing things that seemed fun personally.  I played with Kynetx (founded by my BYU professor Phil Windley) and Singly (founded by Jeremie Miller of XMPP fame), both of which are still very worthwhile projects with huge potential (and you can see from my labels that I've posted about them before).  Other related projects are redecentralize.org and projectdanube.com and cozy.io.  Anyway, the Respect Network in particular is a brainchild of Drummond Reed and it's had a few changes of directions, starting with connect.me, though I look on that activity feed and I don't see much happening there; Drummond Reed and Doc Searls and Kaliya Hamlin and Phil Windley (remember?) are big people in the identity space, eg. the internetidentityworkshop.com conferences, and so I still expect to see big things out of this set of initiatives for owning our own data.  Anyway, my hope is to push for these kinds of tools and protocols to help fight the silos and lock-in of Facebook and even Google... on top of the basic infrastructure tools (eg. pack.resetthenet.org).

Saying all that, I realize that it's not very widespread at this point.  I think they're laying out the protocols and doing cool stuff, but it's still at the experimentation point, I'd say.  But some of the concepts are sticking, eg. these XRI names... I got my first one a few years ago... so I think they're worth getting now.