There are some "really hard problems" that could definitely use the brain power assembled but apparently are never pursued.
Like self-driving cars I guess.
Are there effectively (company) political red lines at Google Inc. that preclude pursuit of solution to problems such as distributed, non-centralized, social networking, or, somehow the engineers unconsciously choose to [only] pursue solutions that fit with the corporations business model?
Google had at least 3 goes at building decentralized social networking[1][2][3].
As an external observer the one time I've seen behaviour that could have been characterized as avoiding pursuing a solution because of Google's business model is that Chrome has decided not to implement the "Do not track" solution that Firefox has implemented[4]. Google does have some reasonable technical arguments on their side (arguments that are best made by Apple, which doesn't really have a lot of skin in the tracking game[5]). Still, if you want to look for political interference that's where I'd look, instead of expecting yet another tilting-at-windmill quest to build an decentralized social network.
[3] http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ (Ok, OpenSocial isn't decentralized. But it does allow application portability between social networks which certainly has the effect of decentralizing power)
Like self-driving cars I guess.
Are there effectively (company) political red lines at Google Inc. that preclude pursuit of solution to problems such as distributed, non-centralized, social networking, or, somehow the engineers unconsciously choose to [only] pursue solutions that fit with the corporations business model?
Google had at least 3 goes at building decentralized social networking[1][2][3].
As an external observer the one time I've seen behaviour that could have been characterized as avoiding pursuing a solution because of Google's business model is that Chrome has decided not to implement the "Do not track" solution that Firefox has implemented[4]. Google does have some reasonable technical arguments on their side (arguments that are best made by Apple, which doesn't really have a lot of skin in the tracking game[5]). Still, if you want to look for political interference that's where I'd look, instead of expecting yet another tilting-at-windmill quest to build an decentralized social network.
[1] http://www.waveprotocol.org/
[2] http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/
[3] http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ (Ok, OpenSocial isn't decentralized. But it does allow application portability between social networks which certainly has the effect of decentralizing power)
[4] http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/04/chrome-do-not-track/a...
[5] http://www.w3.org/2011/track-privacy/papers/Apple.pdf