I'm still surprised that Google didn't just clone or buy Twitter in the 2009 "Fail Whale" era. Seems like they had 95% of the work done already: a highly-scalabile real-time infrastructure that took Twitter years to catch up to.
(Yes, Google+ came later, but the UX of the boundaries, of where the network started and stopped on the web, felt too amorphous for most people as a social media destination)
Remember Google Buzz? Google tried to copy Twitter and automatically added it to the front page of every Gmail account, fucked up the launch by having everything be public by default, and finally declared it a failed product and abandoned it a year later.
In retrospect, the whole thing was a mini-Google+.
Remember when Google tried to make their own video website? It flopped hard and some company called "youtube" started doing it better, so Google bought them.
When is the last time Google started their own truly successful project, rather than buying it?
