Part of me wonders what would an FC alliance bring to the game? Most games that have alliances have open world PvP, territory wars or something of that vein. Things that are not present in this game save for the Grand Companies. If it were simply social features for FCs, wouldn't they ultimately be overshadowed by the ability to Party Finder (now with enhanced cross datacenter and password locking) or linkshells?

The only use I could see it having would be a multi-FC chat that would grant access to all members in the alliance to chat at any time (sans normal limitations, like PvP). Even then, I'd wonder wouldn't an outside program like Discord be better for this (especially seeing as it has support on phones)? Not to mention that would allow for voice communication as well as typing and instant highlighting of important notifications. Assuming the FC alliance would even have a multichat feature like this to begin with.