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Today Microsoft announced that users of Google Health, scheduled to be shut down on Jan. 1, 2012, can send their data to Microsoft's competing HealthVault service. In the closing paragraph, Microsoft also pitches developers to migrate their Google Health projects to HealthVault.

Google's quest to organize the world's information will no longer include one of society's most important and sensitive sources of data: our health records. The company announced this afternoon that Google Health will be closed forever and deleted in 18 months, along with a thematically similar and also formerly ambitious project, Google Power Meter.

Google says it's shutting down the projects because they got very little traction but health industry tech innovators say that Google Health may have been ahead of its time, did a poor job reaching out to a now growing ecosystem of developers and ought to be put on slow life support or open sourced instead of being shut down. When it comes to patient-centric cloud-based electronic health records, the opportunity remains large, the need severe but the challenges are substantial.

Google announced today that it has begun prompting users of its online health information service to fill out Advanced Care Directives, the documents that communicate end-of-life wishes ahead of time in case you're unable to communicate while hospitalized. On one level, that makes sense: communicate your wishes about being kept on life support or not and store it online with a very stable service provider. On another level, though, this is creepy.

The huge stores of knowledge about our lives and world now contained on the servers of huge companies like Google and Facebook could be put to great use - or they could end up providing the foundation for a sci-fi horror story. Chances are, reality will be somewhere in between. All this centralized information about us will be useful, a little invasive and a little disappointing in the utility actually delivered. When the worst-case scenario story gets written, though, it's hard to imagine this won't be a chapter.

IBM, Google Health and a consortium of medical device makers and other companies announced today that they have created a software platform that will allow medical data from at-home devices like glucose meters and blood pressure monitors to be sent automatically to Google Health or other Personal Health Records systems online. It's a broad reaching software platform that will bring data portability and medical records interoperability in direct conflict with a huge industry entrenched in siloed data.

If you think that "data portability" and standards for an open web hold a lot of promise to fuel innovation in social networking, just imagine what a secure, standards-based, data landscape could enable in health care.

In the middle of one of the worst economic crises experienced by the US, Health 2.0 Advisor Jane Sarasohn-Kahn confirmed today that US citizens are not as focused on heath care as they were a year ago.

"Twelve months ago," Jane Sarasohn-Kahn said, "the most important things on American voters' minds were the war and health care. Two days ago, the most important thing on American voters' minds is the economy. Health care and the war have taken a backseat."

This doesn't mean however, that health care plays second fiddle to the attendees of the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week - it's still their driving force. The rules of engagement however, as Clay Shirky pointed out in his keynote on Wednesday, are changing.