[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.