I told myself that I wouldn’t write a blog post about Google Buzz until I had time to play with it and let the dust settle from the frenzy of reviews during its launch week. It’s been a few weeks now and I have used Buzz almost daily, but so far it’s been a bit disappointing. Some of that blame belongs to Google and some of it is just the will of the Social Media Gods.

There were a couple of reasons that Buzz looked attractive to me and why I thought it might do some good. Its integration with Gmail allowed people to use it without having to go to another destination. As with a lot of great, but failed services, driving traffic and getting adoption early on is an important factor. It’s never about functionality or slickness. There were tons of better options to micro-blogging than Twitter. But Twitter won, simply because that’s where everyone is at. The old MySpace holdouts know what I’m talking about. Even if you prefered MySpace (honestly why would you though), your friends abandoned ship and starting flying the Facebook banner. Your move was just a matter of time. The beauty of Buzz was that it was already in your mailbox. You can’t help put click on an icon that says you have new messages. It’s a calling most of us can’t ignore.

My second reason was based on the first. I felt that more people would use it simply because it was already there. No need to sign up for anything new or go to a different site. My hope was that this would prompt people who I don’t actively use Twitter to get in on the conversation and share information they come across.

Well largely, these two things haven’t developed the way I hoped. Between Google fumbling on the privacy issue and the slow adoption rate by new users, my stream has become yet another source of the same data I’m getting on Twitter. Mind you, I don’t mean the same type of data, I mean the exact same data. (Their feed is linked basically)

The second reason is also a flaw. People who don’t use GMAIL can’t play. The school of thought sometimes is “Well why not just sign up for GMAIL”. If I was perfectly happy with my email provider, Buzz doesn’t offer much that would warrant such a big change for me. Maybe if it also made my coffee and pressed my pants, but unfortunately no dice there, so I can understand people’s reluctance to switch.

Will Buzz get better? Probably from a technology standpoint, but it’s very difficult to reclaim the trust of the web. The Internet is a 24×7 word of mouth factory. It’s a virtual water cooler where rumors, opinions and viewpoints spread quicker than the plague. If you don’t make a positive splash on launch your product may never the negative press. (See Windows Vista) Google has been dragged through the mud on privacy and on a lack of compelling features to leave Twitter. Creating a Buzz destination site could be helpful for those that don’t want to make the switch, but the GMAIL integration is a must and should remain intact.

I’m not turning off Buzz just yet, but the buzz is slowly fading into silence.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 8:30 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.