His "new invention," which he calls a system of "flowing, multi-person, real-time conversations" is, to me, a cheap copy of Twitter. I just signed up to take a look at FriendFeed and I have to say I'm not impressed.
Everything that is present in Twitter is somehow recreated in FriendFeed. Direct Messages, Replies (or as they refer to them, 'My Discussions'). One of the main differences is the ability to separate you friends into categories, either 'Personal' or 'Professional.' There is also the ability to CC your FriendFeed posts to Twitter, which, if you are using Twitter, is pretty senseless. Why the need to join something new?
FriendFeed also does away with the character limit that is present in Twitter. I have yet to form an opinion of this, because honestly, it could go either way. The positive side is that I have tried to write stuff that went over the 140 characters on Twitter in the past, and been slightly annoyed that I had to abbreviate some words, so not having a limit would have been helpful. The negative is why do you need so many characters? Twitter is touted as a "microblogging" website. If you wanted to write a blog, there are other ways to do that (as evidenced by what I am currently doing.)
Google has done a lot of good in the past. Their web search is the most popularly used, and has even become synonymous with searching for a topic online. Their AdSense program has allowed many people to create an extra stream of income, with little to no extra work on their own. Their G-Mail is, well, it's e-mail. Nothing too spectacular about that.
I think that Google just feels that since they are Google, they can shit gold. In the past, their ideas and inventions were the height of innovation, but now, it just seems like they are trying to cash in on what's popular, under the guise of changing the world.
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