
As Buzz Sounds More Like Crickets, Does Google Need To Be More Patient? - jedwhite
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/01/google-buzz-life-or-death/
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nl
(I'm a big fan of Buzz, and I loved FriendFeed enough to build a very similar
service a couple of years ago)

One of the problems with Buzz and similar apps is that they don't allow
people/celebrities/marketers a way to control the view of the conversation
like twitter does.

In Buzz (and blog comments, Facebook, FriendFeed, HN and just about any other
service invented) the comment thread is attached to an original anchor post.
That seems like a feature from the usability point of view - or at least I
always assumed it was a feature.

 _BUT_ , it turns out that if you are famous you don't want random people's
names and comments attached to your own.

On Twitter, Oprah can say something and no one else sees the millions of
people who doubtlessly beg her for giveaways. Government departments can tweet
and not have to deal with the politics of approving/disapproving comments on
their posts, etc etc.

Buzz etc promote interaction, but it turns out the the grief associated with
interaction simply isn't worth it after a certain point.

I'd note that almost all the Twitter leadership group use it continuously.
OTOH, while there are assorted (great) Google developers and PMs using Buzz I
haven't seen any senior leadership using it - let along interacting on it
(OTOH, most of the FriendFeed leadership did use it - maybe that's what kept
it going).

I'd also note that this problem applies to Facebook, too. I think that in many
cases Facebook pages are run by professional marketing people, so that pushes
back the critical level of grief somewhat

I'd love if there was a better explanation for this. If this theory is true
then I'm not sure what Google can do to fix Buzz - attaching a broadcast-only
mode would be a difficult change to make.

~~~
wyclif
_while there are assorted (great) Google developers and PMs using Buzz I
haven't seen any senior leadership using it_

Depends on what you mean by 'senior leadership.' Guido van Rossum uses Buzz
and interacts with users there.

~~~
nl
_Depends on what you mean by 'senior leadership._

Anyone listed on this page:
<http://www.google.com.au/intl/en_au/corporate/execs.html>

~~~
wyclif
Ah, but the fact that those people don't use Buzz doesn't correlate to the
success or failure of Buzz. I suspect there may be good reasons the Google
Executive board does not share on Buzz.

~~~
nl
_I suspect there may be good reasons the Google Executive board does not share
on Buzz._

I agree. In-fact, that's exactly my point!!

I'd note that more that one of them use Twitter, so it's not a legal, policy
or commercial problem. My theory it that it's too much work to keep the
profile clean on Buzz.

However, all those listed on [http://www.quora.com/Twitter-company/Who-serves-
on-the-Twitt...](http://www.quora.com/Twitter-company/Who-serves-on-the-
Twitter-board-of-directors/answer/Adam-Rifkin) as members of the Twitter board
_do_ use Twitter.

I'd love to hear a better explanation.

~~~
groks
You can "Disable comments" for a Buzz post. Folks can still @mention you in
their own posts. Which makes it very much like Twitter.

~~~
nl
But they can only @mention you (and have it show a link) if they know your
email address (or their contact details are in your Google Contacts)

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ianb
I believe (through entirely indirect sources) that Buzz is successful inside
Google in a way Wave was not. Unlike Wave they have at least managed to create
something that is successful even when it's not successful -- I can happily
read Twitter and some blogs through Buzz without feeling left out, while
enjoying some of the advantages of Buzz when they are available. Wave didn't
feel like that to me... it was potentially super-cool while being practically
entirely uncool. I don't think it was going anywhere... and that indeed may
have been because Google as an organization wasn't capable of doing what it
takes to make a novel interface (at least in terms of Lars' inferred
critique).

That's the criticism of Buzz that is most obvious and resolvable from this
article as well -- Buzz looks blandly Googlish, no more or less. When
integrated into Gmail, sure... but why should my Google Profile (which is also
the container for deep links to my Buzz posts) be so incredibly boring?

The good parts of Buzz? Honestly it's just the balance of interaction and
community. Facebook has a solid (and useful!) basis as an interpersonal
communication tool. I use it with family and friends and it provides genuine
social value. Twitter fills the professional side... and Twitter is great for
pithy comments, but I've had enough with pithy comments and the celebrity
stance -- Twitter succeeds in popularity because of its constraints, but for
those same reasons it dodges any thoughtful discourse. It's just not for me
any more, and while I'm not wedded to Buzz there needs to be a not-Twitter...
and I kind of suspect Twitter can never be that, because maybe there needs to
be 3 things (even though it only feels like there needs to be 2 things).

~~~
waterlesscloud
Wave just needed a good emacs mode to have been made for it.

------
zmmmmm
Buzz had a lot of early problems but one thing I really like and use is that I
can easily make posts to private groups of my contacts. So I have a bunch of
people who want to hear about baby news and they are in one group and they are
getting buzzes about the new baby and there are others in the professional
sphere who get different ones, and I can choose to post privately to those
groups, or to everyone or to make it public - and this is all an integrated
part of Buzz. I won't / can't post this kind of stuff on twitter or Facebook
(both being too public in different kinds of ways) so Buzz fills a useful and
important niche for me.

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davidj
Aside from the horrible name, it was a huge invasion of privacy. Immediately
people who I haven't talked to in years were able to find out all the detailed
contact information on everyone I associated with and my clients for the brief
time until google disabled the "everyone can see all of your email contacts"
feature. It really show you what google thinks of your privacy. Even now I
don't know for sure if I have it disabled, and there is really no way to know.
For a while google made it so that if you accidentally clicked on "Buzz" it
re-enabled the "everyone can see all of your contacts". Maybe they fixed that,
who knows.

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jsz0
Google can't kill Buzz. They need to maintain the illusion of having some
social networking strategy. It's better to have people scratching their heads
wondering what Buzz 2.0 will look like than to admit you're hitting the reset
button again. They didn't have to worry about this with Wave because no one
seems to have understood what exactly Wave was or what it was competing
against in the first place.

