Posts belonging to Category Google Buzz

If you read this blog (any other digital blog) regularly, or just generally don’t have your head in the clouds, you’ll know that last Wednesday, Google launched its latest attempt to grab a piece of the social pie, Buzz. And if you have a gmail account, by now you’ve surely seen this creature in action. So now that we’re a week removed, and we’ve got a week’s worth of media reports discussing Buzz, I thought I’d take a moment to deposit a few thoughts below.

One of the biggest issues I (like many others) have with Buzz is that Google is (as TechCrunch puts it) forcefeeding it to its gmail users. I mean, I get it – gmail has millions of users to capitalize on. And Google’s general strategy this year seems like it’s “try to be everything to every user,” which inherently means competing with anyone who stands in the way of achieving that strategic goal. They’ve more or less taken on Apple in the smart phone market, they’re battling Microsoft to maintain search leadership, and now they wanted to chip away at Facebook and Twitter’s foothold in the social networking market (here’s a little more recent news on Twitter usage). Maybe it was Google’s rush to bring Buzz to fruition, maybe it was just a misguided confidence in Google loyalists, but whatever the case, Google more or less thrust Buzz upon us, rather than making it a “stand-alone” product, like it did with Google Wave. Sure, it asked us if we wanted to opt in when we logged into our gmail in the days after Buzz was announced, but that’s hardly the same voluntary choice of explicitly requesting access (from Google or a lucky friend), as it did with Wave.

The other thing is this whole “privacy fiasco.” Personally, my panties weren’t exactly in a bunch over the auto-follow feature. I wasn’t enamored with the fact that when I first agreed to integrate Buzz, there may have been people automatically following me who I barely ever corresponded with and who probably wouldn’t appreciate all of my borderline socially inappropriate humor. But it wasn’t a huge problem for me, because I don’t use my personal gmail account all that often. But again, I get the complaints, and I really don’t know why Google felt it needed to have us all automatically follow who it deemed interesting to us by virtue of our email communications. Presumably we could have just as easily manually found our favorite contacts and followed them on our own. Given the obligatory outrage every time one of “our” favorite social platforms change features/layout, Google really could’ve seen this coming. But hey, they quickly fixed the “problem,” so to their credit, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water, right?

Either way, when I’ve used Buzz, I’ve been kind of underwhelmed. With any social platform, it’s about conversations and I just don’t see that many happening in my Buzz. Now, that may very well be a function of the people I’m following more than it is a function of the product. But I can’t really ignore the fact that I’ve seen very few people use it, and very few conversations happening within it. Sure, I can share things I find interesting from my Google Reader, but if I share a link in Buzz and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound (if you catch my drift)? Why wouldn’t I share that same story on Twitter or Facebook, where I know people are chattering, assuming I want to converse about it?

Anyways, the last thing you need when you’re launching a product that will compete with Facebook and Twitter is bad press, and that seems like all Google’s gotten. So regardless of Buzz’s long term merits (and Buzz may still prove to be a solid social tool), Google certainly didn’t help itself by screwing up the product launch.

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