Thanks to totnuckers for asking if I'm still yawning re Google-Plus.  

Executive summary: Yes. 

The details... 

First let me congratulate Google on a successful launch.  

It's good for them, bad for the Internet.  

I don't care what it means for Facebook. 

Bad for users. 

Neither good nor bad for me. 

Thing is, I don't use Facebook or Google-Plus. I quit smoking too. (I still use Twitter, and drink coffee though.)  

I don't believe in putting my best work into corporate blogging silos.  

The last bit of interest I had in that, a willingness to believe in the goodness of companies (though it was more like putting blinders on) went down with Friendfeed. 

I just did a review of the preferences system in the OPML Editor. There's a page in there for Friendfeed prefs. When should I take it out? It probably already should have gone. It's a joke to think at one point I was willing to build features in my product that depended on their servers.  

I thought Friendfeed was pretty good, in some ways excellent. Ironically, given the name, they didn't really do great things for and with feeds. It was more of a discussion server. And it had some very nice back-end features, like stay-alive connections you could build stuff on top of. Since then I've built my own, based on their example. So net loss isn't very great. 

The question is, why are you pouring your creativity into Google's box? Do you really think it's going anywhere good? Maybe you'll want to read what you were writing in 2011 someday? They're just starting, and there's sure to be rock and roll. And I'm not sure anyone there really knows how to evolve online communities. If they do, I don't know who they are.  

Anyway, what they're providing isn't so hard to do, and there are plenty of programmers willing to step up and do great work that might plug into theirs. Question is -- do you think they really want our stuff to connect with theirs? I mean really want. You know, like Twitter wanted our creativity! Sure.  

I wanted to develop Internet software ever since I knew there was such a thing. It wasn't until the web that I could actually do that. I've never been able to do great work, long-term, within corporate platforms. For that reason alone, I think we'd be nuts to give over our future to Google. Or Facebook or Twitter, or Apple, or whoever. They really only make one kind of corporation, and our role, at best is to buy stuff from them, or make the wheels in our cages spin. If you want to be really creative, you can't do it in their context. Luckily we have the open web. Why don't we do our work there, instead? 

Anyway if you want to give them your future, go right ahead. I'm going to work on the web where the sky is blue and the air is clean, and I don't have to worry about getting crushed by no big tech machine.