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Comment by intellectronica | Hacker News Reader

Actually the same can be said of your answer :-/ That the iPod was a me-too product is an interesting comment, because it reminds us to look at what was special about it (beautiful design, tight integration with the desktop and media store). What's special about Buzz?

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That last sentence is the right question. If you think about _that_ for a few minutes instead, you will certainly come up with some arguments (positive or negative); but just saying "is G the next M?" is negative-content, really.

- tight email / reader integration, of course. For non-geeks, one communication center is enough, and GMail is the right place: most won't setup a combined IM + Mail + Twitter + FB + RSS desktop tool.

- lower barrier to entry: many people don't consider they have enough interesting things to say to make it worth creating a twitter account. They would more easily buzz it, since it's there in their mail account.

I have lots of friends that are regular users, sending crappy content to each other via email ... like funny clips and stupid jokes. They don't even use BCC or a mail-list so it's not uncommon to see an email sent to 40 addresses at once, all there in the "To" header :)

IMHO, this is genius.

tight integration with email?

When the iPod debuted it only worked on a small percentage of the world's computers and had no media store. It grew into a winner, but the first gen wasn't particularly special.

The first-gen iPod had Firewire (instead of pre-2.0 USB), the scroll wheel (vs. button-only interfaces), and it actually fit in a shirt pocket (vs. the Jukebox which was the size of a portable CD player).

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