The web had the feature and it failed: everyone flocked to Facebook and Twitter to live within their happy walled gardens. What do you want Google to do - sacr

The web had the feature and it failed: everyone flocked to Facebook and Twitter to live within their happy walled gardens. What do you want Google to do - sacrifice their business to pursue some ideological point about how geeks think the web should be? Google is being reactive here. The web already lost this feature, because us (we geeks) failed to make a distributed, federated model appetizing enough for Grandma and Aunt Maud to use. I think there's still opportunity for a federated model to arise and beat the pants off Facebook and Twitter (and G+ for that matter) but it's not going to happen as long as we're all in denial about the flaws of the old model.