Online buzzing
penny February 13th, 2010
As if we’re not busy enough bees already, then another online toy comes along. Google Buzz is not a lot different from current social networks as Facebook and Twitter, except that it can reside along with other Google tools at your usual disposal.
It’s an interesting implementation. Most of your contacts in Gmail automatically get added to your buzz list, but they don’t get to participate unless they activate Buzz in their own Google account. At the moment, I’ve found it fun to see some quirkiness from my usually quiet contacts in Gmail. Though it might easily become a passing novel feature that people will forget like Google Wave, at the moment it looks manageable enough to be easy to understand and use for people. Like anything, the experience can be different for different people. It would largely depend on which contacts you have and how you use the tools that determines how it works for you.
A lot is wrong with it right now, with posts randomly appearing from nowhere. But I think it’s more the linking of external websites that is causing this issue, and it really isn’t surprising at all. You can enable Flickr, Twitter and other websites to update in Buzz (but I don’t think you can do the opposite, yet). A detail that may bother some is that anyone with a public buzz can be viewed by other people, and in turn, strangers can see your contact list. I’m not sure if they can actually “SEE” the entirety of your buzz contact list. But for sure if you have a google profile made public, you will appear to others even if you don’t know them. It’s important that Google makes this clear and fixes these privacy issues.
I am not sure why Google has this fancy for releasing half-baked tools. Buzz is no different, I guess. There needs to be some better way to control Buzz the way you want it to work, but I’m not sure exactly how. Kevin Rose has blogged about Buzz twice in a row now: First, he explains why Google needs Buzz, and then he outlines a few requests on what features should be added/tweaked. Perhaps he’ll be a more eloquent ‘explainer’ of what the potential is on this new Google tool, i.e. what fuss Google Buzz deserves.
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