For me, I see Facebook as an application. It's a social network, just one thing of many I use.
Google, on the other hand, is a platform. It's Gmail and YouTube and Maps and G+ and the Play Store and Drive and a whole bunch of other things. Not just a single app, but a family of apps that share a common identity. I don't see my Google account as just credentials for an app; I see it as a common login for a whole ton of different apps. In particular, I'm used to the paradigm of "use my Google account to pull my identity and my data down to my Android device", and I don't see any problem in extending that paradigm to apps that aren't made by Google.
As a user, I actually prefer Google's Oauth login precisely for lack of the underlying platform.
It lets the site confirm that I'm the Gmail account I say I am, and if I accidentally give it publishing permissions, it can shit all over my Google+ profile without anybody impacted. Giving a Facebook app publishing permission is a bigger hassle, so Facebook logins carry more cognitive load.
He argued Facebook is more a platform than Google is - apparently because its easier for developers to build inside of Facebook's platform than Googles.
> Huh, he seems to focus pretty heavily on G+ API, which was probably pretty bad when he posted this in 2011.
The repost of this (I don't know how close it was to the original sharing) was about a month after Google first released the initial, extremely limited G+ API -- and only four months after Google introduced G+. (Google had already rolled out another set of APIs at the time of that repost.)
> Any idea if it's gotten better?
G+ in specific has a much more robust API than it did at the time (unsurprisingly, given how new it was then), and more significantly Google in general has really developed very much in a way that seems to be in the direction Yegge was calling for in the essay.
Google, on the other hand, is a platform. It's Gmail and YouTube and Maps and G+ and the Play Store and Drive and a whole bunch of other things. Not just a single app, but a family of apps that share a common identity. I don't see my Google account as just credentials for an app; I see it as a common login for a whole ton of different apps. In particular, I'm used to the paradigm of "use my Google account to pull my identity and my data down to my Android device", and I don't see any problem in extending that paradigm to apps that aren't made by Google.