First Look: Google Buzz

A few days have passed, and I have started to get a sense of Google Buzz. There is certainly meat on the bones there, but here are some questions and observations:

My World Is Not In Gmail

There is a real difference between the people that you work with via email — which is the starting point of your Buzz network, based on integration with Gmail — and the folks that you might want to interact with on topics like politics, technology trends, and the meaning of life. Especially if, as in my case, you have invested considerable time and energy growing and weeding an extensive social network on an alternative service like Twitter. As a result, I have already migrated a lot of the social give-and-take that I used to carry on in email years ago out to Twitter. You won’t find those people or those relationships in my Gmail.

Small Group Socializing

The part of Buzz that makes it sensible to put into email is the small group socializing aspect.

I created a group in Buzz called ‘techno babel’ and shared a Buzz thread with that group. This is an obvious overlap with email ‘cc’ lists, and represents an easy way to do lightweight, chatroom style group discussions.

As I say in the thread that I sent out to ‘techno babel’:

The creation of defined social circles with some sense of reciprocity — as in this case, where I created ‘techno babel’ to push on this feature of Buzz — is obviously missing from Twitter. These could be stable, long-lived groups (as in organizations or companies) or one-off on-the-fly collections of people, like invitations to a dinner party. But everything does not have to be conducted in the absolutely largest scale or else totally one-on-one private.

I wonder if this is the camel’s nose for Buzz: if people simply create Buzz threads whenever they might have otherwise cc’d people in email? And if people in the Buzz groups are not using Buzz would be involved via email, but the experience for Buzz users would be Buzz threads? That doesn’t seem to be the case, right now.

In fact, I spent awhile creating a Google profile for a non-gmail email address (Yahoo), but I couldn’t seem to get Buzz to show up. Looks like you have to create a Gmail account, and then you can get Buzz on your profile. But there isn’t any other way to play, is there? So communication with outsiders — people not signed up with Buzz/gmail — doesn’t seem to be working. But it would be cool. And it would be a great on ramp to pull people in.

Why Does This Feel Like Friendfeed?

I have the disconcerting sense that I am in Friendfeed when I look at Buzz. And I didn’t really love the Friendfeed experience:

from Bottom Feeding Off Friendfeed

the issue is that Friendfeed appears to be intimidating to people, and hard to learn how to get a benefit from it.

It may also be that the benefits of Friendfeed only accrue to very popular people — like Gray and Scoble — who have dozens or hundreds of acolytes who respond to their every post with a barrage of commentary. I will also suggest that those who are very active followers of those two and their ilk may also get a secondary, real and significant benefit as well. But the average schmoe, wandering around in Friendfeedland, having not perfected either massive social popularity or the followership model will try the service out and quickly leave never to return because there is no ‘it’ to get for them. There is no there there, as Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland.

 In my Buzz this morning, several extremely well connected folks — Jason Calacanis, for one — is buzzing up a storm, with hundreds of folks chiming into his thread. It’s just the experience that I disliked in Friendfeed: A-list pundits holding court with dozens or hundreds of acolytes jumping in.

I don’t want to socialize in a world comprised of A-lister dominated chatrooms, wandering from room to room.

I want to participate in a connected network where the edges between social scenes form the background, not the foreground, of social conatext. That’s why I have found Twitter so rewarding, and why Friendfeed was a no-op for me… and so many others, who stayed away in droves.

Tentative Conclusions

It is early days, yet. I haven’t really gotten into the swing of Buzz, and my read of it is biased, as I said at the top, because so much of my everyday socializing has moved out of email years ago. But that may well be the case for most adult web users, and certainly the majority of young people. So, maybe that is the normal situation when considering Buzz.

The email inbox as the context for my socializing seems both obvious and a step backwards, at the same time. Obvious, because yes, I go there frequently and there is a sort of a network of people that I know there. But it seems backwards since I haven’t been socializing in a network way with my email contact list, and I have been doing that elsewhere for a long, long time.

I think there is something potentially very rich in lightweight group collaboration in Buzz. Twitter and others have failed to deal with the social scale between one-to-one and the entire world. Direct messaging in Twitter feels like an afterthought, not a core design element. Twitter could counter Buzz by devising a means to socialize around groups, which so far are being used as in-bound aggregation, not out-bound communities, more like a media tool than a social one. I would advise them to look into that.

Alternatively, Google’s tool may be less about the larger open social discourse that is conducted in Twitter and Facebook, and more about the world of work, which is how most of us use email these days. If that is the case, why don’t they incorporate Gcal and Google Tasks? That would be a better fit with work, and it would make Buzz more of a Yammer and Basecamp killer than a threat to Twitter. It would be a social business application based on networks, and not targeted for open social discourse, like Twitter.

Update on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 9:08AM by Stowe Boyd  

I forgot to mention a peeve that they will likely clear up. I can’t use ‘@username’ to address a buzz to sometone, I have you use their email address. They will fix that soo, I bet.

Update on Saturday, February 13, 2010 at 10:18AM by Stowe Boyd  

Umair Haque offers thoughtful observations abotu Buzz. Here’s one:

via Google Buzz and the Five Principles of Designing For Meaning

[…] when I click on Buzz, it’s like being punched in the face with a giant fist of information. It aggregates tremendous amounts of stuff — but instead of simplifying it, it simply stitches everything together. I’m not sure what gains that offers me. It feels a little bit like Buzz was the product of raw engineering talent, designed without a purpose in mind. “Because we can” does not equal “because it matters.”