Just kidding of course. I am, as always, annoyed by the silly clone arguments. - Paul Buchheit

I thought it was a clone of Wikipedia :) - Clint Ecker

Knol is also a major step backwards in database access. (http://www.databasecolumn.com/2008...) - DeWitt Clinton

And Knol hates the IETF (http://friendfeed.com/e...). - DeWitt Clinton

it's a crowd sourced about.com -- you don't have to deal with the editorial overhead of about.com .. and still make $$ - david koblas

Wait, I thought it was supposed to be a clone of FriendFeed and couldn't believe how badly they screwed it up. Now it all makes sense! ;) - Robert Seidman

I thought it was supposed to be a bakery? Now where can I get scones? - Alex Power

No. It's a Twitter clone for people who need more than 140 characters to express themselves. - Adewale Oshineye

The most interesting bit is that the front page says "Who needs a search engine? Ctrl+F". Is this really made by google? :) - Andrew

I think Knol and Android will both be Google's failed productions. :) - friendfeed

i wouldn't bet on that - Chris Hofmann

They're all just word-sharing sites. That space is way overcrowded. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

That's funny I didn't get that feeling. Knol seems a pretty simple way for researchers to distribute and "monetize" their work in ways which don't currently exist. - Jim

isn't it a twitter clone? - Niv

It's more like Hubpages, Wikia and Squidoo than del.icio.us. You don't start off with a news article or blog post as a springboard. - Jason Menayan

It's not unusual for Google to fail. Google Video. Android. Blogger. Lively. Many failures. Nice search engine though. - Bret Treasure

@Bret What definition of failure are you using to generate that particular set of products? - Adewale Oshineye

mmm... Android actually runs already on mobile platforms, at least I've seen it running on our Maemo, but... Google makes everything to fail its own kid :) - A.T.

If you define sucess in terms of a business and financial sucess then most are failures as they don't generate (alot of) revenue. However, these are too broad. Youtube is clearly a success, yet Google are having trouble monitizing all that traffic. Google Video is a failure becuase Youtube got there first (same with Soapbox). Android is because Microsoft and Symbian got there first. Blogger because of Wordpress, Typepad, etc. Knol will fail becuase Wikipedia got there first and declared the games closed. - Roberto Bonini

"Got there first" is not a solid argument. Tandy, Sinclair, Atari, Amiga "got there first", but it was IBM PC which then took the world by storm. (Just an open specification, but it made a lot of difference.) - 9000

@Bret Let´s not forget Google Base, which apparently was Google´s vision for what web 2.0 has come to be (Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Yelp etc.). In fact, I´d state that Google´s weakness is to produce applications that require some social element in order to succeed. YouTube, for example, is mainly a social network around video and it totally owned Google Video. - Mario Nogueira Ramos