I think Google's on the right track - they're just optimizing for friends and families instead of brands. It's defensible to posit that the relatively high qua

I think Google's on the right track - they're just optimizing for friends and families instead of brands. It's defensible to posit that the relatively high quality of Facebook's social graph is due in part to how strongly they validated identity in the early days (by requiring e-mail addresses from reputable universities). Further, it might not be realistic for a social network to pursue both the highly validated identity model (i.e. Facebook) and the wide-open, syndication-friendly route of Twitter simultaneously in the early stage. There's room for improvement, but this has some of the air of the usual end-user indignation that a product doesn't have a comprehensive feature-set at launch.