To glom Buzz/Salmon/OpenSocial (the great intertwingularizing era, circa 2008) & Google Circle together is to marry night & day. These are opposite ends, opposi

To glom Buzz/Salmon/OpenSocial (the great intertwingularizing era, circa 2008) & Google Circle together is to marry night & day. These are opposite ends, opposite realms. Buzz, Salmon Protocol, OpenSocial: these were hopeful, strong, API oriented, pro-value-creation protocol-based interoperable ways of connecting the world, making new system creation possible. Engineers doing internet engineering things, trying to build an ecosystem for interconnection. Google didn't realize building healthy, interoperable, internet technology wasn't their core strength & drop it. The story is much sadder. Their new head guy showed up & personally demanded things go his way & that everyone build his pet project, Google Plus. A vanity Facebook competitor with a real name policy, with no extropic/network benefits, no connection to the rest of the net (although you could send some data in to it: literally it's only api, one method): just another shitty little social app. Google eventually realized this product was trash & insisting every team creatively find ways to interoperate with it was a mess, and canned this shitty little social app. (One I used & enjoyed, but which was of scant real enduring value, was deeply disconnected.) There's two eras here. They look like opposite ends, to me. As for Meta. Well. There is a lot of the vanity project bent, judging the book by it's cover. But I also think it's good to increase the engineering challenges, to go big. To find new hard problems. Google Plus was just a cheap knock off, a facsimile, with some narrow twists (Circles). Facebook is at least trying something. I have sincere doubts about headsets, but the idea of virtual place, & of re-materializing the virtual makes a lot of sense to orient & re-ground (what a pun) computing - could do a lot. But Meta could walk either of the two Google paths I just described: they could walk the open, interoperable, ecosystem path & kickstart a new era in computing with a buoyant healthy technical ecosystem, or they could walk the Google Plus era path & create a closed, proprietary product or series of products that try to succeed so strongly on their own that they inflate a new market singlehandedly.