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.

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.