It's better than Twitter and FF because the messages can be larger. Images and videos look better. You can see a conversation inline. etc.

It's taking the best of the Twitter ecosystem, Twitter, Friendfeed and putting it into Google's social graph. It's innovative with the combination of features they've chosen to employ, but it's not original, though. Search was never new when Google started either, remember.

-- edit: I am going to use Buzz to start blogging again. Instant viewer base, who I can identify.

Just as a nitpick: "the messages can be larger" is an anti-feature for me, and for many others that use Twitter. Inline images and videos is one thing, of course, but if longer messages was a feature then blogging would have defeated Twitter before it launched.

Most people can't figure out RSS readers, and twitter lets you read and write in the same interface. Everything else about twitter is an anti-feature, including the post length limit.

The main reason for the 140 char limit is SMS. When it launched, Twitter was mostly a way to do a sort of SMS listserv.

I wouldn't call the 140 char limit an anti-feature either. Its become a key differentiation point, and is in many ways what makes Twitter Twitter.

You can say a lot on 140 chars, also if something's junk you know quickly to not read it. It also doesn't take a lot of screen room, thus there's a lot of data available without a scroll down.

It would be interesting to have a 140, 700, 5000, unlimited character filters in Buzz. If its display algorithm was used well, it could work out if long posts from a particular person were usually not worth reading to most people.

Most true open source software doesn't have the launch pad of GMail either. Besides that, the fact that the open source community clones software and gives it away is just as sad. Open sourcing something doesn't make it pure.

If that were enough to be "evil" then everything would be evil.

I don't care if Google is evil. They're a large corporation trying to make money like any other. They don't care about us.

* Nobody is claiming that Google is innovative in this example.*

My point was that the vast majority of Google's products are clones and yet they're still considered innovative where the same is true of Microsoft and they are not thought of that way.

Was Google Maps a clone? Google Mail a clone? Wave a clone? AppEngine a clone? The Chrome browser a clone? Android a clone? GWT a clone?

What are you talking about?

Yes to everything except for Wave and AppEngine.

I'm pretty sure Google didn't invent web based maps, e-mail and the web browser. Wave and AppEngine were good but useless...

They may not have invented web-based maps and email, but the functionality of Google Maps was leaps and bounds better than anything else out there. Before Google Maps, you had to click and reload to move around or zoom. Similarly, while there were web-based email providers out there, none of them approached webmail the way Gmail did. Abandoning folders for tags and search? What webmail system was that a clone of?

I'm pretty sure you don't remember using web-based maps before Google Maps. They had no AJAX.

Perhaps you attach some other meaning to "clone" than an exact genetic duplicate, indistinguishable from the original except for gestational differences?

Further, was Google Search a clone of Altavista?

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Most of those products where purchased by Google.

See for yourself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google

You are not reading that table correctly.