Never forget that you are not the customer, you are the product.
Also, you created an account an hour after this article was posted just to type a banal cliche that we've all had to endure endlessly?
We are still a good five or six years away from the point where Google would have to worry about alienating the users whose data they sell, and with the decreasing amount of Internet education most users get before starting to surf the web, the distance from that point is increasing. They thrive on the eternal September.
As for the Eternal September... I used to think it had been just a momentary problem that led to the unfortunate demise of USENET. I am starting to wonder if it wasn't, in fact, a first symptom. Programmers from my generation ought to have been so happy to see this happening -- the WWW available to everyone, connecting everyone. If only it weren't for the wrong reasons. The taste of my dream turned out to be a lot more bitter.
As for the Eternal September... I used to be able to talk to people on the internet, with threads, groups, and killfiles, using the software of my choice. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
I imagine MySpace were saying something similar for a couple of years as Facebook started really taking off, and Yahoo probably thought no new search engines were a threat a year or two before Google arrived.
The Internet is a funny place. A lot of Internet users move in herds, which means a disruptive newcomer can grow very fast if the whole viral networking effect kicks in, but usually when that happens one or more established players must fall to create the space.
On the other hand, MySpace was not hooked on so many and so important portions of one's Internet life, nor did they have the advertising upper hand that Google has.
With Internet, we've had our innocence time, with few advertising, relatively clever users and smart, responsible usages.
But Internet will become the new plaza for the populace, filled with orange blinking advertisers, awful designs that only lowerclass people can accept (think saving a file in Windows 8 or just... facebook), like supermarkets who swap alleys around just to make you walk in front of new products, like neon lights which look awful as they try to catch your attention. And websites will get bugs as they grow old, because margins will be shallow again. The story of any long cycle in economy - 2012 was the top of the curve.
And Google will fill perfectly in the middle.
Even Facebook's ad buy system is better than Google's current one, and being worse than Facebook's ad buy system is an achievement that I always assumed would require years of practice and a lot of natural talent.
Social networking is today's TV, that you must participate both as a way to spend your life and to not be alienated from all the other people in your lives that use and talk about social, or TV, or whatever the next thing will be.