[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.