the sad part of this is that Google used to be about being 'open', i.e. open standards and federated services. I like the notion of my indexer containing both public and acld data, but it's very Microsoftish that all the ACLd data has to exist within a proprietary repository owned by the indexer.
What would truly be innovative would be a solution that supports crawling of private information on the web including those sites that aren't part of Google.
Yes. This was Google Buzz. The technology behind it was truly great (Salmon, Pubsubhubbub, and friends). It was federated. Everyone took a dump on it every chance they got, despite it being a technically very sound solution to the problem. There's no reason they can't layer in federation now, but it's clear Google is focusing on making the user experience great first because without users, it doesn't matter whether you are federated and open.
Completely agree on this. On the other hand, this is also a fault on Facebook's side at not being open with their social graph. If FB had been open, maybe Google wouldn't have had decided to build G+ in the first place...
This is ridiculous. Facebook has a very open API at https://graph.facebook.com that makes nearly all data on Facebook profiles "open" once the owner has granted permission to access that data.
The issue here is that Google wants unfettered access to scrape/index all of that data, or at least the public info and then build a huge business around the copied data.
Facebook isn't stupid. Anybody that would let their biggest competitor walk in, copy their entire database, then build products on top of it with no recriprocal business relationship would be stupid. Google doesn't let people copy their web index, or detailed profiles of everybody on the Internet that indirectly uses Search, AdSense, Analytics, etc.
Google built G+ because Facebook balked at giving the keys to the kingdom to Google basically for free, so they decided from now on their only recourse was to own as much data on their own servers as possible. This contrasts with their old business of passively indexing what they have access to without making huge business deals with third parties that still maintain control over the data Google will increasingly rely upon to stay relevant.
Great in theory, but it's impractical to expect that you're going to get your friends to give access to their FB data so it can show up in your search results. Just awkward.
