Not to beat a dead horse on this defeat thing, but it's defeat from the perspective of trying and failing to have a competing social network. I like your optimism and I wish Google's reasons were that noble. But it's hopelessly naive to say that they are shutting it down as part of a trend of selling services rather than info.

#1, they're shutting it down to avoid a massive backlash after being hacked, because otherwise they might steal the crown of "most disreputable Big Tech co" from Facebook, which could begin to affect their stock price much like it has Facebook's.

#2, they are making inroads in every other part of their business sacrificing user privacy for nebulous features/benefits. See the recent debacle over Chrome auto-sign in. They basically tried to change the definition of Chrome from "it's a browser" to "it's Google" without anybody noticing.

Not particularly consistent with a company ostensibly moving away from a business model relying on targeted advertising.