The facts: AT&T admitted, at trial, that they “published” this data. Their words. Public-facing, programmatic accesses of APIs happen upwards of a trillion times per day. Twitter broke 13 billion on their API ages ago. This is something that happens more than the entire population of Earth, daily. The government has no problem with this up until you transform the output into something offensive to important people. People with “disruptive” startups, this is your fair warning: They are coming for you next.

The other one of my prosecutors, Zach Intrater, said that a comment I made about Goatse Security, my information security working group, starting a certification process to declare systems “goatse tight” was evidence of my intent to personally profit. For those not in on the joke: Goatse is an Internet meme referencing a man holding open his anus very widely. The mind reels.

I can’t survive like this. I am happy to be hitting a prison cell soon. They ruined my business. The feds get approval of who I can work for or with: they rejected one company because the CEO had a social network profile with an occupation listed as “hacker.” They prohibit me from touching any computer that isn’t federally monitored. I do my best to slang Perl code on an Android device to comply with my bail conditions. It isn’t pretty.

“It was Edouard Taza, the president of Skytech. He said that this was the second time they had seen me in their logs, and what I was doing was a cyber attack. I apologized, repeatedly, and explained that I was one of the people who discovered the vulnerability earlier that week and was just testing to make sure it was fixed. He told me that I could go to jail for six to twelve months for what I had just done and if I didn’t agree to meet with him and sign a non-disclosure agreement he was going to call the RCMP and have me arrested. So I signed the agreement.”

Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don't get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: "So is it the Stalker API?" She got all glum and said "Yeah." I mean, I was joking, but no... the only API call we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess the joke was on me.

Microsoft has known about the Dogfood rule for at least twenty years. It's been part of their culture for a whole generation now. You don't eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food. Doing that is simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes. Platforms are all about long-term thinking.

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there's something there for everyone.

Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: "Gosh, it looks like we need some games. Let's go contract someone to, um, write some games for us." Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them.

Although we don't buy all of Oracle's arguments (most importantly, we don't believe much of what they assert is copyright protected subject matter is, in fact, protected by copyright, such as API's), Oracle has probably done enough in its response to put the issue of copyright infringement before a jury. Of course, the court still needs to rule on Google's summary judgment motion.

"I can confirm the National Rail Enquiries Website is for personal and non-commercial use only. Therefore, the suggestion made in your letter, to utilise the data to build an Android application is expressly prohibited. I'm sorry that we cannot be of any further assistance."

It isn't true that National Rail Enquiries (NRE) refuses to open up its data feeds.... We've opened up our data to a range of organisations, often free of charge, so they can provide information about trains.

Still, Facebook's privacy concerns aren't totally bogus, and this dispute does illustrate the point we made on Monday about the challenge of building an open API while preserving user privacy. It's true that users ultimately have control over which applications and sites they approve to access their Facebook data. But users aren't necessarily going to know which applications have good privacy policies, nor are they necessarily going to want to invest the time and effort to figure it out. So it's not necessarily a bad thing that Facebook is imposing at least some minimum standards on sites that use their API. And while Google obviously isn't a fly-by-night organization, Facebook may be worrying about the precedent it would set if it started allowing sites to funnel information gleaned from the Facebook APIs to third party sites that Facebook had no control over at all.

Mike Arrington wonders, "How dare Facebook tell ME that I cannot give Google access to this data." I certainly agree with this sentiment in principle, but I think it's missing the way applications work on Facebook. About once a week I get asked to try out some new Facebook application that I've never heard of. I'm already pretty reluctant to approve any of these applications, but I'd be a lot more reluctant if I knew that there was a reasonable chance that signing up would lead to my data being available to random third parties. And in most cases I don't have the time and the interest to research the details of each application's privacy policy. So there's some value in having Facebook enforce reasonable privacy rules on behalf of its users.

But on the other hand, the fact that Facebook can and does arbitrarily disable Facebook apps isn't going to be good for the health of the Facebook ecosystem. If I were a software developer, I would certainly be reluctant to develop for an "open" platform like that. And in the long run, that's a big threat to Facebook's dominance of the social networking universe. Facebook is big, but it's not as big as the rest of the web put together. If a company like Google can figure out how build a usable, open social network atop hundreds of websites, it will give Facebook and MySpace a real run for their money.

They're going to face some serious challenges in the privacy department, though. We discussed the privacy dilemma with Facebook apps back in January, and both Facebook and MySpace are going to have to grapple with the same set of issues with their new strategies. On the one hand, they need to lock things down sufficiently that one bad (or compromised) application can't suck down a ton of private user data and do bad things with it. On the other hand, if they are too restrictive, it will limit the usefulness of their platforms and discourage third-party websites from using them at all. Striking this balance, and coming up with security mechanisms that give sites the information they need without giving away the store, will be crucial to these initiatives' success.

I think it's possible that these problems will prove intractable. Ordinarily, when we talk about an "open API," we mean an API that anybody can use without any kind of pre-approval, and that doesn't constrain how data received through the API is used. Obviously, MySpace and Facebook aren't going to want to offer an API that's open in this sense; there's too much potential for mischief if an application can trick a user into authorizing a malicious application. So unless they can come up with a really elegant mechanism for limiting the spread of information, there's going to have to be a vetting process, which will mean extra overhead that limits how quickly the platform can grow. It's going to take a lot of ingenuity to make these platforms open enough that a lot of potential partners can participate while keeping them closed enough that they don't become vehicles for the bad guys to cause problems.