Nobody talks about why Google defederated GTalk. At first, Google was very idealistic in its mission, perhaps even doe-eyed in the manner expressed in the arti

Nobody talks about why Google defederated GTalk. At first, Google was very idealistic in its mission, perhaps even doe-eyed in the manner expressed in the article: no defensive patent portfolio to match their level of innovation (until Apple went "thermonuclear" on Android, and started an internecine patent war); open GTalk XMPP federation (until Facebook extracted GTalk users' "social graph[1]" without giving any data back). No internal data controls so that employees could to innovate quickly, trusting they'd do the right thing (until an engineer harassed SF Bay Area teenagers he knew IRL using their Google data), and so on. No technology can win against the human condition. 1. At a time when the hype for social graphs was a little higher than it is for AI now, and Google viewed its battle with Facebook as existential.