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> The first hypocrisy is the idea of 'Openness', Google often describes their competitors customers as 'hostage' when they won't allow Google access into their system, or 'walled' because they use a closed model. However there is nothing preventing Google from allowing facebook to access Google's data.

I'm confused; facebook can trivially write software that would allow you to transfer all your G+ data (circles, contacts, +1s, etc.) to facebook using google's APIs. Facebook has no such APIs.

And I think your suggestion that these data liberation APIs exist only because G+ isn't number one doesn't really mesh with history and reality. AFAICT google is pretty committed to allowing the data you put in to come back out.

I wish google would let me crawl blogger pages for my index. I don't think that is fair that google can index the web, but has created a walled garden for the content they host.

Basically, if you start indexing the web, and some sites are hosted in blogger, google will block your crawler if I remember correctly

    User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
    Disallow: 

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /search
    Disallow: /

    User-Agent: googlebot
    Disallow: /search
    Allow: /

Woah, that is surprising. I note Bing has blogspot in its index anyway. Perhaps they use the ATOM API when they see a Blogspot URL? (technically not 'crawling')

Where are you getting that? It doesn't match what I'm seeing. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/robots.txt

Googled for "blogspot", picked first random domain I saw, "weliveyoung.blogspot.com", fetched "weliveyoung.blogspot.com/robots.txt" with curl, got a redirect to "weliveyoung.blogspot.co.uk/robots.txt", fetched that, voila.

Perhaps there is a user setting that controls it.

Looks like you can use whatever you want. The one I linked to is the default.

https://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...

What are you talking about? The only aspect of Blogger that is robot restricted are the search pages (as they should be).

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/robots.txt

Talking about this

http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

There other ways of blocking crawlers other than robots.txt

This is why Larry talks it up, not because he's much concerned about users being held 'hostage', but rather he wants an easy way to leech users from facebook into Google+

Why can't it be both? And even if it isn't, that's not hypocrisy.

'video' is relegated to the last menu option under 'more'.

When you search for something, "Video" is the third option in the sidebar, which happens to be significantly more visible than the menu.

Another often touted soundbite is that Google is all about being truthful,

Where, and by whom? I think that's just a strawman.

> However there is nothing preventing Google from allowing facebook to access Google's data

Actually, Google engineers are actively making it possible for users to liberate their data:

http://www.dataliberation.org/

> Google wants there to be no competitive advantage

I believe Google wants users to have the best possible experience, and possession of a user's data should not be "nine-tenths of the law."

> Facebook is significantly larger than Google+, meaning that sharing data will always be in Google's favour.

It may be larger than Google+, but FB's Market Capitalization is $69.5B, while Google is $199.1B. I think this invalidates your argument on this point completely.

Not only that but Google has been calling out Facebook on this since long before G+ was launched.

>Actually, Google engineers are actively making it possible for users to liberate their data:

This is already shown to be incomplete, and is basically identical to what Facebook allows the user to extract. The 'hostage' scenario described is not being able to easily import your data to another social network.

>I believe Google wants users to have the best possible experience, and possession of a user's data should not be "nine-tenths of the law."

Google definitely want the best experience, as long as it's on their services only. The video searching example is a perfect example, why are other video irrelevant suddenly? They're not, they just don't put money in Google's pocket.

>It may be larger than Google+, but FB's Market Capitalization is $69.5B, while Google is $199.1B. I think this invalidates your argument on this point completely.

Actually now I'm just calling B/S Fanboy alarm. Market cap has no bearing here, facebook only went public 2 days ago, it has no affect on the number of users they have, or that fact that google want a similar number of users for Google+.

I don't think the Data Liberation Front is identical to what Facebook allows the user to extract. For one, I can't get the contact information of my friends.

The situation is absolutely asymmetric. I can download all of the email addresses of all of my Google Contacts, right now.

That you think Facebook isn't holding your data hostage sounds to me more like Stockholm Syndrome.

Regardless of the relationship between Google and Facebook, it's a good feature that Google allows you to download that. It'd be nice if Facebook offered the same, don't you think?

I don't know what you mean about videos, honestly. If I search for "somebody that I used to know," I see Youtube, vimeo, nbc. And those all have embedded images, enticing you to watch the video. Is your assertion that vimeo "puts money in Google's pocket"? Searching for other videos that I know are not on Youtube produces them in search results, just fine.

If I Google "Robert Scoble Facebook," I can find his page pretty easily. Tell me what to do, within Facebook, to find his Google+ profile?

And you can call fanboy all you want. You apparently think "number of users" is the only metric of value, which is fine - that's your opinion. My opinion is that market cap is a pretty good indication of the relative size of a company, and by that metric, Facebook is the underdog. It's a shame they're also holding my data hostage, because that means I'm not going to root for that underdog.