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.
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.