[seiwyn]

The author is guilty of time traveling here. Obviously now we know that social networking CAN be viral. Its always easy to look back and say "how did they miss that?".

Also, buzz was meant to compete with facebook? I always considered it more of a twitter knock-off, as the user experience is much more like twitter than fb.

Google is definitely playing catch-up now, but its a mistake to count them out. Myspace got replaced by facebook, so another power shift (although unlikely) is not unthinkable.