Buzz
Those of you who use gmail or googlemail will have encountered Buzz and those of you who have found yourselves linked to my Buzz feed will recognise chunks of this blog post!. It’s very early to say but I am not sure what to make of Buzz. I don’t use Twitter (I did for a short time but didn’t see the point and discarded it pretty quickly) but I do use Facebook a lot and I have blogged since 2002. I also have a Google home page which brings in some RSS feeds and I have a Google Wave account which I would like to use a lot more but which has seen no action since before Christmas. So I can see a long term utility in something like Buzz which operates, at least in part, as a kind of agrregator for other social networking activities (and is quite reminiscent of Wave in many respects).
On the other hand, one reason why I like gmail is that it has excellent spam filters which keep the signal:noise ratio to a healthy level and Buzz has the potential to flood me with chatter. I have addressed this through labels and filtering but still I suspect a lot of junk ahead.
On yet another hand, I am concerned by Google’s underlying business model which is that they are an advertising vehicle disguised as an applications company. Their efforts to bring various applications together, while admirable, do have the happy effect for them of making the distribution channels for ads very much more efficient. One of the reasons I discarded Twitter, apart from it being an utter waste of time, was that I started to see invitations coming through at work to seminars about how to use Twitter as a marketing tool and I decided to bale out early. Similarly I blocked a Facebook “friend” whom I know socially when he began to put marketing materials through his status updates and links.
But most irritating of all is that there is no support for Buzz on my Android phone because it is too an early a version. They still manage to get it to work on an iPhone though! I’m not concerned about the application itself,just the apparent slide into Microsoft-like backward compatibility issues and that sucks big time.
Having said all that, and as I mentioned, I find Buzz quite reminiscent of Wave and it probably has equal potential, assuming that it becomes more intuitive to control and manage so that it doesn’t become a glorified spam channel.
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