Scott Earle's Website

Google seem to be taking over the world.

I know they have made a point of not being evil, but it seems that they are trying to corner every activity on the Internet, from web search, email to chat, to social communication to … whatever Wave and Buzz are about. I mean – they even have a free DNS service!

So right now, mere months after the raging excitement followed by bewilderment that was the release of Wave, we now have Google Buzz.

And the buzz (pardon the expression) on the internets seems to be … “what’s it for?”

Well, I ‘installed’ Google Buzz last night, and was playing with it a little today. My first impression is that they have taken several ideas and melded them into one. Here is approximately what Buzz does for you:

1. Allows you to follow people and for them to follow you.
2. When you post something, it starts a ‘conversation’ that can be continued by commenting on it.
3. Anything you say can be read by your followers.
4. Anything added to a conversation can be read by you.
5. Buzz updates to conversations you have participated in, appear in your Gmail inbox.

Allowing people to follow people and to be followed is nothing new. Add the ability to read what people you are following are saying, and this starts to sound remarkably familiar.

Yes, that’s right – at first glance Buzz sounds like a Twitter replacement.

However, it goes deeper than that – and if it sounds strange, it’s wider too.

Anyone who follows anyone in a conversation will ’see’ the conversation, and can contribute to it. So an interesting conversation will tend to spread among a wider audience as it gathers contributors.

The depth is that a conversation is not just a collection of comments by various people, but an actual conversation similar to how Gmail handles email threads.

If you use the Gmail website as your mail reader, Buzz sits within Gmail in a similar fashion to how Google Talk does, except that it appears as a label below the Inbox. In a similar fashion to how you receive Google Talk notifications in your inbox when you are not logged in, Buzz conversations also appear this way, and clicking on the ‘Buzz’ label removes them from the inbox.

(note: if you add a Gmail filter to automatically archive conversations whose subject contains “Buzz:” then the notifications do not appear in the inbox. Thanks to @lbutlr for this tip!)

There is of course no Twitter-esque 140-character limit to posts.

Conclusions

I have only been using Buzz for a day, and even in that day only on-and-off. But I think it shows promise. It is obviously levelled at Twitter, but given how popular Twitter is I don’t see it giving up the ghost just yet.

As a tool for conversations with groups of people, it shows a lot of promise. The functionality does seem genuinely useful, and if you weren’t a Twitter user I can see why you would think this was fantastic. However, to someone who uses Twitter to communicate with a multitude of people, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is just a Twitter+.

And are Google trying to take over the world? Only time will tell.

Popularity: 80% [?]

Tags: Buzz, Google

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 21:37 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.