Social computing is a good thing. Being able to share data easily has led to astounding advances in what we all think of as the web over the past few years. It's unlikely that anyone reading this is unaware of all the cool stuff Web 2.0 has brought with it.

What's worrying is how the current generation of Internet technology has increasingly centralized control of just about everything into very few hands. What we've seen is essentially a return to a sharecropping model where users neither own their tools nor the computers those tools run on.

Prophet is one possible answer to the problems presented by current cloud computing systems. It's our deepest hope that we'll see a rich ecosystem of distributed social tools in the coming months and years.