Since dozens of bloggers are already weighing in on Google Buzz, the new social-network-slash-personalized-stream-of-information from Google, I’ll keep my remarks brief (see below).
More valuable, perhaps? A compilation of the best posts about Google Buzz:
- Jeremiah Owyang – Side-by-side comparison of Buzz vs. Facebook vs. MySpace vs. Twitter
- Jason Falls - Video demo of Google Buzz
- Jason Falls – Google Buzz is Not a Facebook Killer
- Frederic Lardinois - Google Buzz: The Missing Features
- Steve Woodruff – Tongue-in-cheek post on bloggers over-hyping Google Buzz
- Lifehacker – How to remove Google Buzz from your email
- Ted Carlson - Google Buzz privacy flaw
- Gina Trapani - How to Do Everything in Google Buzz
A few quick thoughts of my own:
- Once you figure out how to use it, Google Buzz has some value. I like engaging in longer-form conversations on topics relevant to me. Sometimes Twitter’s 140-character limit is…well…limiting.
- Yes, Google Buzz is just like FriendFeed. If you use/used FriendFeed, you’ll know what I mean.
- Google Buzz is just one more inbox to manage, one more place to get information from people I’m already conversing with. If it allowed me to dump two or three other inboxes, it’d be swell, but I’ll still have email, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader (blog subscriptions) and more.
- More noise. Follow one person on Twitter, you might see 20-40 micro posts a day. Follow that person on Buzz and you’ll see hundreds of updates. And they’ll be longer. And they’ll have conversations with other people attached to them.
- Missing features. I can’t share (or can I?) something from Buzz to another network without jumping through hoops. There are plenty of other missing features, but this one’s huge for me. How am I supp0sed to invite others to join a rising conversation?
- Wait and see. Game-changer is a trendy word when something’s brand new (remember Google Wave?). We’ll see how it fits in our lives in 6-12 months.
Have you seen a good Google Buzz post? Send me a Tweet.