Not all new releases are created equal. The release of Wave in September of last year, for instance, was truly a media event. Web sites (and newspapers) proclaimed that we were witnessing the arrival of a game-changing tool, and people clamored for invitations to open an account. Of course shortly after many of us got our hands on the tool and started playing with it we started to realize that here was a wonderful solution in search of a problem. It may have been game-changing, but few of us felt the need for the new game. I hope that there are people still playing with Wave and trying to figure out how to use it well, but most of the people I know have other things to attend to.

The release of Buzz was also festive. It was released at the beginning of February of this year, and in a manner similar to Wave seems to have simmered to a whimper, though the fact that it rather seamlessly integrates with gmail makes it the sort of tool that's hard to ignore. But it, like Wave, has a large social aspect to it, and since Google wants to penetrate that field more fully, these received lots of press. The ability to star a search result is basically a personalized service, so Google didn't trumpet it, nor numerous other modest services and search enhancements, with the same fanfare that these other services received.