Google+ is the social backbone

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.<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>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 <i>static</i> files in easy-to-use formats, then we might have something.<p>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.<p>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. :-)

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+.<p>Maybe I've not looked much (I've just Googled a bit and had no results) and there's some?<p>For now, G+ is just another Facebook. With a minor differences.

In this regard, I found the Diaspora federation protocol docs quite interesting:<p><a href="https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Diaspora%27s-federation-protocol" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Diaspora%27s-feder...</a><p>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.

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.

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