Social software controlled by its users.
Large, monolithic social network services (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, …) shape their services to serve the needs of their advertisers, often at the expense of users and occasionally with unilateral changes to the terms.
Federated social software (Diaspora, …) is free to use largely because it is small. When/if it becomes large, it will become dominated by advertiser-funded service providers - much as email is today - which presents the same problems as the large monolithic services do today. Further, as user identity in these systems is tied to their domain names, moving from one service provider to another is usually infeasible or at least very time-consuming.
User-funded services (app.net, …) remove the advertiser influence problem but leave users unable to easily change service provider, so unfavourable and unilaterally changed terms remain a problem.
Social software can in principle be built which is controlled entirely by an app on the user’s smartphone, requiring service providers only for undifferentiated communication and storage services. The choice of service provider(s) can be changed at will, thereby keeping control out of their hands.
More detail is on its way, in the meantime there is an introductory blog post.