I love this quote from Dan Brickley in his blog post Open Social Networks: Bring Back Iran:
For me, one of the big motivations for working (through FOAF, SPARQL, XMPP and other technologies) on social networking interop, is so young people in the future can grow up naturally having friends in distant nations, regardless of whether their government thinks that’s a priority.
I do believe that with Social Networks and other tools of People Connectivity, we can incrementally “Change” the world for the better.