You could run your own laconica server instead of Twitter (and still plug into Twitter, just like identi.ca does). But who does?

Still, you are right and I completely agree that google does it “the right way”. With that sentence about data silo’s I meant what you say: Google has first mover (and biggest player) advantage and will likely keep that unless the seriously mess up.

This is not true, you could run your own ‘wave’ server, use a non-google client and data wouldn’t ever make its way to Google (just like e-mail today). Ofcourse, being the first to offer it, many people will probably stay with google.