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> This is Google we are talking about, their main move has always been to release their own version of the service, hope to win, and only if that fails, do they open up their pocket book.

But it failed! See what happened to Jaiku

Jaiku was also bought, not developed in-house.

I'm not quite sure I agree. If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google, you will see that they have often bought companies as well.

In some cases you might argue that they have bought less known companies, refactored and rebranded the service, and then used it to go after the marked share of a more known service.

i would wager that google is not buying the service , rather the community. many twitter clones exist but the community is with the original - and that is what is valuable, the data they produce.