Google+ is the social backbone

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.

"The launch of Google+ is the beginning of a fundamental change on the web. A change that will tear down silos, empower users and create opportunities to take software and collaboration to new levels."

Replace "web" with "email," and you've got every fluff piece that was written about Wave.

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.

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.