That is so true. I also did not understand what the real world application around this technology would be. Any ideas there? Something that can be understood in not so layman terms :)
1) A distributed wikipedia/dbpedia. Instead of fighting with deletionists, one would just run its own node of the graph database, and keep/merge/sort changes that they see fit.
2) Recommendation engines that are seeded with the user data, at the edge. For instance, instead of me having to upload my song library to Apple or having a last.fm scrobbler running, I would able to have a "Genius" feature without ever having data leaving my computer. If I want to get my friends' recommendations, I could just add them as peers.
3) A medical expert-system that can analyze my medical records that I hold, instead of one central place. Instead of trusting something like Google Health or Microsoft HealthVault to keep the data safe, I can be the only one with access to it, and only talk to my doctor if this system triggers some sort of alarm.
