After talking at a little length about Google Buzz yesterday, I was thinking this afternoon about what it would take to make it a success in the face of the functionality present in Twitter and email.
Twitter has what can best be described as a huge following. Sure, it has limitations – but for the most part people are OK with that. They are familiar with how to use it, and how it behaves.
But to me, the clincher is that Twitter has a published API. With that, anyone who wants to can write a Twitter client on literally any platform (any platform that has a TCP/IP stack, at any rate).
This has led to a plethora of clients for every smartphone, every desktop OS. Every system that people would like a Twitter client for. There is a Twitter client for the Commodore 64.
But wait – Google has an iPhone app for their Google Apps! Have you seen it?
Google iPhone App
I would laugh about this app if Google weren’t being serious about it.
They actually released an app that when you open it shows you a list of Google’s apps, several of which do have counterparts on other systems (such as Google Talk) – and when you click on one of them, it really does (and I am not kidding about this) … close the program and open the web-based app in Safari.
I am sorry Google, but that doesn’t cut it.
Google are talking about providing gigabit internet to people’s homes. Where they are based, there is almost complete 3G coverage at good speeds. But come on Google, don’t assume that everyone has this as an option.
Where I live, the government has not yet issued any 3G licences to any of the mobile operators for actual use. The only ones that have 3G have to say they are ‘testing’, and the service can be disconnected at no notice. There are I believe four or five cities in the country with this ‘testing’ 3G coverage, and I am fortunate that the city where I live is one of them.
When I went on holiday upcountry a few months ago I had mobile phone coverage and a GPRS data connection. Not 3G. Not EDGE – but GPRS. This is slower than what I had in the UK for “dial-up” access to the internet fifteen years ago.
Whereas dial-up speeds are perfectly adequate for simple text transfer (as used by the Jabber protocol used by Google Talk), it certainly doesn’t cut it for rendering modern web pages with images and AJAX, which is what you get with a Google web app.
On an ‘OS native’ application (one written to use the operating system and its own UI), you can switch between screens at the touch of a button. You can cache messages and information. On a web app, switching screens means loading a whole new page. Fine when you have unlimited bandwidth, but sucks at dial-up speeds.
So … Back to Twitter
As mentioned earlier, there are Twitter clients on every platform that has any life in it. In fact most platforms have several clients. How many clients are there for the iPhone, or the BlackBerry, or MacOS, or Windows? This is one factor that has contributed to Twitter’s success. Without it, everyone would have to use the web page to tweet.
If that were the case, Google would have a real contender with Buzz.
Google are not Stupid
Extremely successful in their core business, Google obviously do know what they are doing. I can not imagine they would release Buzz without having a plan for it (although I still wonder what happened with Wave).
Even today, two days after they rolled it out publicly, they have already made significant changes to Buzz – they have started to address the security/privacy implications of using it.
I am really hoping Google can turn Buzz around. It has a lot of potential. But really, a web-only solution is not going to be enough to make that happen.
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Another blog post about Google apps : http://tr.im/NVFI