Surprised? Absolutely not. Google has a team of thousands of engineers, all of which can't possibly be working on it's core products. They'd all be disasters (See Brook's Law). I for one wonder why this sort of "innovation" didn't happen sooner.
As an aside, I sometimes wonder what all the engineers at Google do. Obviously they have an impressive portfolio of products, and I'm sure many internal, and even more just not released yet, but they're constantly hiring. Will it eventually get to a point where half of their engineers are just looking for their keys in play ball pits?
When I left late last year a lot of divisions/projects were in a hiring freeze, don't know if that's still the case but they've definitely kicked the 100-new-people-in-the-lobby-on-Mondays habit.
> I for one wonder why this sort of "innovation" didn't happen sooner
There are a lot of hoops to jump through for this sort of "innovation". A lot. As in, these social features started being really pushed by VPs and the like way back when Facebook Apps launched, and are just now slowly seeing the light.
As an aside, I sometimes wonder what all the engineers at Google do. Obviously they have an impressive portfolio of products, and I'm sure many internal, and even more just not released yet, but they're constantly hiring. Will it eventually get to a point where half of their engineers are just looking for their keys in play ball pits?