Twitter Grapes are sour, sez Google - then apologizes

Google's Eric Schmidt re Twitter:

"In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don't have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?

I think the innovation is great. In Google's case, we have a very successful instant messaging product, and that's what most people end up using.

That IM product is not Jaiku, a Twitter-like Google bought, we assume

Blink!

(He's right. of course - as Twitter grows, Tweetdeck et al will need to look more like Outlook or Thunderbird - but the point is that Google, with all the King's horses and men to call on, ain't been able to build Humpty - again.)

Update - Schmidt now says he didn't "diss Twitter" and was, of course, misunderstood - what's interesting is that the Google PR machine felt he had to actually make a public grovel (sorry, clarification).