Gmail Google Buzz
One of the biggest “buzzes” in the technology scene is Google’s latest attempt to break into the social networking market and draw some “buzz” from social networking heavy weights like Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace. While this Gmail add on has received a lot of media attention, especially over the privacy outrage some users experienced when they realized that Buzz automatically imported “followers” from their Gmail address books. This caused obvious complications as not everyone in your contact list is someone you’d normally want to follow you on Twitter or be your friend on Facebook. For instance, not everyone wants to have their boss know their opinions on politics or religion or even their latest exploits in their sex or night lives. Similarly married couples have already reported many types of embarrassing situations which committed couples often find themselves in when one or more of them is living a secret life
Truth be told, it is the opinion of the author that Google Buzz is all hype and delivery at all, really. There are very few options, barely any customization available, a fairly ugly and stripped user face, and the inability to link up your Buzz account properly with other social networking sites. The most glaring example is that while you can receive tweets from your Google Buzz account (in theory at least, the author was not able to no matter how hard he tried), but you are not able to send them. This seems to me to be a gross oversight, as it would be extremely convenient to be able to send tweets about the latest links that I’ve received from the myriad of news, science, and entertainment newsletters I receive by subscription.
Google might introduce several new updates and changes to Buzz in order to fix these problems, but even if the glaringly obvious problems are solved there’s still the issue that Buzz doesn’t bring anything unique to that table. What incentive do users have to make the migration from much more interactive, popular, and most of all established social networking sites? Even though there is a big buzz about Google’s latest project, this bumble bee thinks that there’s no honey to be found, and that’s just now sweet.
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