Almost a year ago now I blogged about the impending death of innovation when it comes to the user interface and asked “Does everything have to taste like chicken?”

My point was that in the rush to get the next great Web2.0/Social Networking/collaborative toy out into the market, developers were just copying each other and no one was being really innovative. Rather than celebrating the fact that one could be genuinely different, the prevailing view seemed to be that if you simply just throw more and more familiar stuff into into the same pot then the customers will be happy. Its the equivalent of the one stop shop…. the BlueWater approach to development. Just put as much as you can in one place and then the punter doesn’t need to think – they can just do. So as a result; Facebook updates Twitter which can update Facebook and set your status automatically in Linkedin which can pass the information to Plaxo and so on. Tweetdeck can be a browser and can now do embedded Picasa and YouTube, Disgby can look like Google Talk but actually update everything – aggghhhh !!!

Well, here we are almost 12 months on and its no better – infact to my eyes its getting worse…. and the most recent offender in the tastes like chicken stakes is Google Buzz. Who in the name of all thats good and true though we needed yet another social networking tool and then, worse still, who thought it would be a bright idea to embed it in a really good email client. Jeez, it must have been ‘Chicken Tonight’ over in Mountain View when they came up with Buzz. Now I don’t intend to go into the well documented privacy concerns here – you can google them – but just pause for a minute on the approach. Did we really need another status setting tool ? Did we really want to grow our already impossibly large contact lists again ? Did we really want our finely tuned and pimped Gmail client messed up with yet more notifications ?? ….. and wouldn’t an add on to Gtalk been just as useful (sic) ?

To my eyes, and granted they’re getting on in years now, it seems that there’s no value in being innovative. First mover advantage has all but disappeared and now we can all be fast followers – even Google – by just incrementing what already exists. Call me an old cynic but everything really is starting to taste like chicken

What d’ya think ?