It is amazing how quickly google is expanding its influence beyond the idea of organizing the world’s information. There are plenty of community-in-a-box vendors out there plus some great open source packages. There are also standards emerging for connecting these communities together so that members of one can participate in another. Yet google appears to be releasing a free competitive offering that nominally embraces the standards but looks about as closed as could be (at least in its current incarnation). Yes, adding a bit of javascript and having everything in an iframe is a really easy way for sites with limited or no technical resources to add these features but is that a good reason for google to provide this? I am really curious to see what the terms say about data ownership. It appears that increasingly google wants to not just organize but also control the information.

It is amazing how quickly google is expanding its influence beyond the idea of organizing the world’s information. There are plenty of community-in-a-box vendors out there plus some great open source packages. There are also standards emerging for connecting these communities together so that members of one can participate in another. Yet google appears to be releasing a free competitive offering that nominally embraces the standards but looks about as closed as could be (at least in its current incarnation). Yes, adding a bit of javascript and having everything in an iframe is a really easy way for sites with limited or no technical resources to add these features but is that a good reason for google to provide this? I am really curious to see what the terms say about data ownership. It appears that increasingly google wants to not just organize but also control the information.