Let's say fb/twitter release a public api to access the social signals. So things like number of likes on a particular news page. In return, is google willing to release the data on number of clicks on a particular search result for all queries? Seems a bit hyprocritical no ?
And Google's proposition to all web sites everywhere is that in exchange for indexing their content, they provide exposure through the best search engine and the main interface to the web for most people. This is also what FB and Twitter are complaining about: that they aren't receiving proper exposure.
It seems like a fair deal to me, and for Twitter and FB to be complaining about lack of exposure when they're trying to charge for the data that would appropriately affect their ranking is what seems absurdly hypocritical to me.
I honestly don't really see the downside to them opening their data to Google, though. They were in a better position before Google started G+. Google didn't want to make a social network. They just wanted the data. They had the open social initiative and were trying to make social networks interoperable, but FB and Twitter resisted. They sort of forced Google into the position of competing directly with them. Now they're complaining about it.
What really confuses me is what was the downside to them opening up to Google? (Esp. Twitter, who actually had a deal where they were getting paid for access to the firehose.) Google wasn't competing with them directly. In fact, Google was in a position to direct a lot of traffic to them.
The only thing I can imagine is that both FB and Twitter thought they were going to be able to obviate search and tried aggressively for that. I don't know why they thought Google would sit still for that, though.
I don't understand how so many people are missing the point demonstrated by http://www.focusontheuser.org/. It uses information available from Google search to inject twitter, facebook, etc results into the "your world (as long as it's google+)" module. The ranking it uses is Google's ranking of the relevant results. No special API access. No back-end deals. No money. It's stuff that's available to Google and that Google already has and has already ranked.
If they choose to dilute the worth of their search engine by injecting less-than-relevant (according to their own relevance algorithm) results in order to attempt to grow Plus (presumably hoping that'll ultimately increase the revenue to offset the losses on the search engine side of the business), they are perfectly within their rights to do so. Just don't buy their "oh we'd be happy to show more stuff but boo-hoo we don't have the data" line -- they totally have the data, and it doesn't require sweetheart deals. The only thing they can't do is grab your personal social graph and re-rank according to it. So they use something they know is sub-par (Plus's currently very partial graph) and don't bother dialing in relevance signals against their own best-in-the-world search engine.
Not related to you, but I did some experimentation on my own and published it at: halfaclick.blogspot.com/2012/01/focus-on-thy-users.html. It is not that FB (contributors from where helped develop the FOTU) shows any more focus than Google.
Also the way Focus On The User portrayed the entire thing was not that they are giving a tool that makes Google better but that Google was not using their information. And why just Facebook, Twitter and MySpace? Why not HN, Quora, SO and others?