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Probably Google's biggest failure ever was to recognize they've already had a social network: Gmail.

They tried to develop Gmail into a social network in 2010 with Google Buzz [1]. It received a lot of backlash from people who did not want their email to be a social network.

The social network they were not developing well was YouTube. Eventually, they figured it out, and it's estimated YouTube would be worth $550B as a standalone business today [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz

[2] https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-valuation-wort...

They had so many chat services over time it' ridiculous

Buzz was weird because its main impact was killing another Google product, Orkut

Thank goodness

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