Google Buzz - Not worth the buzz... for me.


Google launched Google Buzz inside of Gmail today and I was lucky enough to get access to it in the first batch of users. I've played around with it for a bit and found that, unfortunately, it's not for me and probably not for a lot of other people either.

At Google's event to announce Buzz this morning, they said their goal was to create a more social experience between all of your current social networking sites like Flickr, Picasa, Twitter, Google Reader, and more. Sadly, Google Buzz just adds another social network to the mix, giving me one more network that I have to manage separately.

A lack of Facebook support is what keeps Buzz from being the top destination for me to get my social fix, and I'm sure it's the same for others. Inside of Facebook, I can already get Flickr posts, Twitter updates, Picasa web albums, and shared Google Reader articles from my friends. Since Google Buzz can't pull in content from my Facebook friends (where most of them are sharing links, pictures, and other stuff), that means I have to use Facebook to view Facebook posts and then Google Buzz to view everything else. Since I can get everything in Facebook right now, I probably won't have a need to pull up Buzz.

One thing Buzz has going for it is that it's incredibly easy to add your accounts from other services to your connected sites list and start sharing them with your friends immediately. In Facebook you've got to dig down pretty deep and find the option to import content manually, which many people don't do. In fact, Google steps you through adding your content from other sites to Buzz when you use it for the first time. Cool!

The whole auto-following (the equivalent of friending someone on Facebook) thing needs to be reworked, though. I was already annoyed that people I've emailed a couple times show up in Google Contacts, and now they're showing up in Buzz too. They're fairly easy to un-follow, but I should have to.

I don't blame Google for not having Facebook integration with Buzz. Facebook is likely very protective of their data and user activity (and rightly so, it's what keeps users coming back and viewing ads) and told Google that they'd rather not play. This, in my opinion, is what kills Google Buzz instead of making it killer. I'll still give it a chance like I did with Google Wave, but my hopes aren't as high as they were for Wave and we all see how popular that became.

UPDATE: I just got my first reply to a post/comment on Buzz and it showed up in my Gmail inbox as an email. This is handy for getting updates quickly, but it also means that every update for every other person's Buzz that I comment on is pushed to my iPhone and notifies me on my laptop as well. This is seriously not good and I hope that Google comes up with a way to prevent this from happening.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gmail Tasks makes me accountable to myself

I really love Gmail's relatively new Tasks feature. It's an incredibly easy way for me to set up reminders for things that I need to do, stuff that I need to buy, questions I need to ask, and everything else. The native iPhone interface is to die for. It is extremely fast and easy to create new tasks, modify existing ones, or mark one as completed. As efficient and accomplished as this makes me feel, it's kind of sad to realize that the sometimes-important tasks that I create would likely not have ever been completed if I didn't have a nice little tasks pop-in window in Gmail. At least I'm actually getting things done, right? Seeing an unchecked tasks that's been there for more than a day really pushes me to get it done so that I can check it off and take it off my mind. Thanks, Google, for making me more productive. I'm sure my wife and boss appreciate it, too.
Read more

Stuck with the iPhone

Of course. When I'm hating the iPhone the most and fed up with how terrible of a device it really is, there's nothing that I can do about it. I tried to get away from it. I just got back from the local T-Mobile store with a brand new G1 , but of course that can't work out. Unfortunately T-Mobile's 3g cover age in my apartment is abysmal. Their website said that I would get 3 bars of coverage, but I'm lucky to hang on to 2 and usually see just 1. Fantastic. I guess I'm just destined to live with a subpar device that's proven to be unreliable, over-hyped, and flat out boring. I haven't even used the thing in about 3 days. It's been sitting in my pant's pocket wherever I go and I can't be bothered to take it out. The most usage it's seen is when I took it out to show my background to my boss (it's a picture of my dog) when he asked about the physical picture of my dog on my desk at work. I'm too frustrated with it to care enough to c...
Read more

Amazon just saved me $360!

With the release of Kindle for iPhone yesterday Amazon just gave me an awesome economic stimulus by saving me $360 in all of about two seconds. Now instead of techno-lusting over the new Kindle 2 , I've got my own awesome eBook reader - the iPhone. Sure, it doesn't have a huge screen or awesome e-ink, but it'll do. The font size is changeable and swiping the screen to flip pages is neat. There's other eBook readers for the iPhone, but they're nothing compared to the Kindle application for the iPhone, and Amazon's Kindle books are way cheaper than any other eBooks I've found. I don't read enough books in a few years to justify the cost of a Kindle 2, but now Amazon has found a way to still make money off of light readers like me. Maybe I'll finally get around to finishing the 9/11 Commission Report (it's only $0.99!) and reading The Audacity of Hope .
Read more