

Google+ is the social backbone - edd_dumbill
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/google-plus-social-backbone.html

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joebadmo
Great piece! This is the aspect of Google+ that excites me the most, that the
one company whose incentives are most closely aligned with a vibrant and open
web has finally released a social product to mostly positive critical and
popular sentiment.

As you note, the examples of Buzz and Wave (not to mention PubSubHubbub) and
especially their open federation architectures indicate Google's open
intentions and seriousness on the subject.

The other great example of Google entering an industry to crack it open, which
you neglected to mention in the article, is Android. While critics have
challenged Google's claims to openness in that arena, I have always found it
pretty clear that their intentions there have been to open the field, and the
setbacks that they've encountered were due to the inherent tension between
openness to carriers/vendors and openness to users/developers. As far as I can
tell, that tension doesn't exist in the social space.

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davewiner
There's a lot of wishful thinking in this piece. Google would have to do a lot
of things that don't seem to be in their nature in order for Edd's dream to
come true.

For example, it's not good enough to export the user's data in zip archives.
It should be possible to access the user's data without it moving. If Google
could share some of their huge bandwidth for storage of simple structured
_static_ files in easy-to-use formats, then we might have something.

I say might because it would have to stay in place for a long time, without
breakage for the "social backbone" effect to start to take place.

That would take buy-in from the whole company over a long period of time for
it to work. Big companies don't have the discipline to keep people from
ripping up the pavement on a regular basis. Small ones too. :-)

~~~
edd_dumbill
It is a long bet, but I think the inherent advantages (in both improving
search quality and in declawing Facebook) for Google of making the social
features commodity will lead this to happen. It needs to happen slowly, as
there are lot of unknown unknowns. The first release of the G+ API will set
the tone.

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drdaeman
Not going to believe this unless I'll see a federation protocol (or at least
official promise of such), so I could possess and host my own identity (not
Google Account) hosted on my own physical server, possibly integrated with my
own services (XMPP, email) and communicate with G+.

Maybe I've not looked much (I've just Googled a bit and had no results) and
there's some?

For now, G+ is just another Facebook. With a minor differences.

~~~
joebadmo
It doesn't exist yet. But Google's history of trying to adopt federation and
with open source in general give me hope that that's part of the plan.

I guess it seems to me like, from their perspective, their previous two
attempts, Wave and Buzz, failed at a user experience level, and so never
achieved wide adoption. With +, it looks like they're trying to really nail
the user experience first. Which strikes me as a plausible strategy.

~~~
drdaeman
I know only two cases Google ever allowing to use externally-hosted identities
to interoperate with their services: GTalk and Wave, both having such
possibility only due to XMPP as their base.

If I understand it correctly, Buzz has interoperability by some means, but not
in area of user identities - only Google users may use Buzz.

I sincerely hope G+ will have strong federation support someday. But for now,
such articles, telling that "G+ is about federation" (while there's even no
API yet, or I missed something?) are over-optimistic and sound more like an
advertisement.

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bergie
In this regard, I found the Diaspora federation protocol docs quite
interesting:

[https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Diaspora%27s-feder...](https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Diaspora%27s-federation-
protocol)

While Diaspora itself might not fly, the protocol could quite easily be
implemented in a bunch of different systems, creating a real federated social
network.

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dajobe
I'm rather skeptical at this stage; the article could have been titled
"Google+ could be the social backbone" but that isn't so provocative. When the
APIs appear and we see how easy it is to get data in AND out via them, then
it'll be clear.

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galactus
Where are the API specifications for developing on top of google+?

~~~
edd_dumbill
They're not out yet. I'm waiting eagerly to see what degree of openness they
offer. My bet is that in this first release they'll offer a compromise between
openness and Google's desire to keep Google+ a service that works well for its
users.

To me, that's the biggest challenge in an open interoperable social layer:
preserving a good user experience.

