> Federated/decentralized is not in Google's own interest, they make their money off of collecting data and controlling both the servers/clients makes that much

> Federated/decentralized is not in Google's own interest, they make their money off of collecting data and controlling both the servers/clients makes that much easier. I see what you mean but having a decentralized network where google can get a decent market share is still better than what they have now compared to facebook which is close to 0% market share if you don't count youtube. Think of it like gmail, thanks to imap and smtp being open and decentralized, Google was able to grab a sizable part of the market with gmail (they have 100M users now I think). So a decentralized social network with a google hosted endpoint would definitely be much more interesting than whatever they have right now. However, problem is that Facebook already won and also Google already tried this decentralized strategy with open social and google buzz and they were huge failures. Also google suck at social mostly because the ceo doesn't care about social and is admittedly bad at it. Also Spaces is probably the worse name possible as it is really asking for MySpace jokes.