There's a very interesting and thought-provoking Gizmodo article by Adam Rifkin today that compares Google use to being like a panda, browsing and foraging, nibbling a little at a time, a lot of the time, and Facebook use to being pulled into a lobster trap, lured by your 'friends' and given enough bait that you don't want to leave right away and, by the time you realise that you want to, finding that there's no way out. Facebook locks in your data, your connections, your communications and what you share in every way that it can. Google lets you forage more effectively, anywhere you like. The point of Google is, by and large, to allow you to pass through as quickly as possible on your way to somewhere else, while the point of Facebook is to get you and keep you. Rifkin suggests that this means Google doesn't get social media but I think that's wrong. Google totally gets collective applications and, with PageRank and related technologies, does it at least as well and probably better than anyone in the world (Amazon might be a close contender, albeit in a very different, collaborative filtering way). YouTube is another very neat application that relies far more on the collective than the network. Again, Google has the world's best collective technology and deserves its greater than 80% market share of search entirely because it is so good at social media. However, the evidence is fairly clear that Google has yet to figure out a way to make best use of networks - OpenSocial, Wave, Buzz and a host of other attempts have singularly not succeeded yet, despite being Really Good Ideas. And I mean, *really* good ideas. The best. If such technologies were taken up and used ubiquitously, driven by Metcalfe's Law and Reid's Law, they would pulverise Facebook or at least force them to join the rest of the world. To some extent, historical accident plays a role in this: things like preferential attachment and the Matthew Principle mean that it only takes a contingent bit of luck for any network application or system to destroy the rest, all other things being equal. On the other hand, to give it its due, Facebook is incredibly good at understanding how such networks behave and has done all but one of the right things in making the lobster pot and ensuring it both gets filled and keeps the lobsters in. That one thing they miss is a clincher for me though and I hope, dearly hope, that it will one day stop Facebook in its tracks. Facebook does not care, even slightly, about the people who use its cankerous boil of a site. The flaw has nearly undone it a few times now, saved only by slick marketing, fast adaptation and the fact that it has trapped enough lobsters to let it ride through most storms with limited losses along the way.

I think the problem is not that Google doesn't get networks so much as the fact that it is working with one hand tied behind its back in trying to not be evil. Google's efforts, if successful, should open up the social graph, enabling rich interactions across many platforms, in many ways, without any single entity being in control. Google's efforts are to do with giving the Web to its users, enabling control and personal ownership, free from the shackles of any central authority, including Google itself. It's not a perfect company by any means and is as interested in profit as the worst of them, but its business model, which is genuinely guided by the company motto, actively puts it on the side of end users: that's the real brilliance of Google, that they have found a way to make capitalism work for almost everyone while making oodles of money in the process (OK, a big exaggeration, but it's certainly a tendency). Facebook, on the other hand, is just plain evil, in an evil genius, psychotic kind of way. Every chance it gets to lock people into its lobster trap it takes with both arms, greedily devouring users and, if it can get away with it, denying rights, ownership, privacy and freedom whenever it suits the pockets of its fat and ugly shareholders. The designers of Facebook are not held back by normal human decency or a desire to do good where possible. If there's profit to be made, they will make it, with nothing but legal and commercial pressures to keep it in check. Facebook users are of as little concern to the owners as the lobsters in the pot: the only reason to keep them happy is to make more profit from them. 

I fear that Google's efforts will go the way of many public-spirited 'better' technologies - anyone remember OSI? But, whether it's Google and/or any or many more bottom-up, open and distributed technologies like XFN, OpenSocial, OpenID, OpenDD, Diaspora, NoseRub, and a host of others, we have to take back the Web. The deeply cynically and misleadingly-named Facebook 'open graph' is the opposite of good, an ugly exploitation of a deep understanding of how networks behave in order to pull the lobsters willingly into the one-way trap.

There are other species on which we might model ourselves apart from lobsters and pandas. Personally, I think the best ones might just be human beings.