Misfiring Neurons Just another geek with a blog

Stop Buzzing me!

Google has rolled out Buzz to much discussion - reactions vary from "can't be bothered, turned it off" to "this is the new Twitbook killer". Here are some very unstructured thoughts on the subject.

Let me start with an observation on the two biggest players in this space. Twitter and Facebook are diametrically opposite in the way that their social links work - Twitter is asymmetrical where following someone has no implication for them. Befriending someone on Facebook on the other hand is a symmetrical relationship. (Facebook has tried to augment this, quite successfully, with the Pages feature.) These core properties also dictate the experience: Twitter serves up small slices of chatter and subscribers see updates fairly close in time to them being published. Facebook on the other hand personalizes your news feed and prioritizes items based on your past activity. (You can also choose to view the latest news from all your Facebook friends from a couple of iterations ago - see a pattern here?)

Buzz's major downside for me at the moment is that the popular posts tend to stay at the top, even if I'm not that interested in them. If you contrast to the above paragraph, you'll see how it fits right in the middle - you get a public conversation with the "buzzing" items floating up to the top. Google will probably tweak the post prioritization over time to get the signal-to-noise ratio lower (I would like a button to mute specific items for starters. Edit: ah, it's right there in the little triangle menu - silly me).

Jason Calacanis writes that "Facebook just lost half its value". I'm not convinced of that - for one, Facebook has iterated on their UI much more and is very good at catering to the use cases that people want from it, IMHO. Another is privacy concerns - for all the gaffes, Facebook does actually have working privacy controls. Google has a lot of catching up to do in pure features here. That is, if they even want to go there. My guess is that they'll stay out in the open like Twitter and sidestep the issue. Simple example: I would upload photos to Facebook that will never see Flickr or Google's Picasa data centres.

I also think that it's Twitter that may have lost half its value - in the 24h that I've had Buzz in my Gmail, I've seen much more potential to strike up a conversation in public on Buzz than I have on Twitter, which in turn tends to be quite impersonal until you have built something of a following. If Google provides an API with open access, Buzz could really become the centre of one's online universe. One potential killer feature (for technogeeks anyway) would be to aggregate ad-hoc social interactions such as comments on blog posts and forum posts from all over the internet. Blogger is already supported, all that's needed is push support in Disqus and vBulletin/phpBB . The challenge here will probably be minimizing noise - think Facebook app spam.

Related - Buzz from the corporate network. How many companies block access to the likes of Facebook? I'd guess quite a few, especially once you reach a certain size. Gmail on the other hand is often permanently open in a browser right next to the corporate Exchange mailbox. Short term advantage to Buzz here, but how long before the network policy declares it an enemy? Gmail is already on the borderline as it is with the embedded Google Talk feature.

I have turned Buzz off for the time being but I will keep revisiting it. I would have much preferred a standalone page which I can visit. As it stands, I find it very distracting in my Gmail. At the same time, I think that over time it will become a very useful tool. I suspect it will eat more into my Twitter usage than Facebook. And I should imagine that Buzz will really hit its stride once mobile support is rolled out.