

Google Buzz is Already Dead - alanh
http://alanhogan.com/buzz-is-already-dead

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cgranade
Oh, goodness. I do tire of the melodramatic pronunciations of Buzz's death
less than a week in. Though some of the points the author makes are valid (esp
having the "Email this" link so prominent), to extrapolate so far as to call
the entirety of Buzz dead on arrival is ridiculous. As I've already said
elsewhere on HN, Buzz has had a horrible rollout that cost Google a serious
amount of goodwill, but the product itself has a lot going for it.

Sure, there may be problems, but they've already shown that they are willing
to fix them. Next to search itself, Gmail is probably their single-largest
profit center, so if they take the bold step of integrating Buzz into Gmail,
that can only indicate a long-term commitment to making the service work. In
short, no, Buzz is not dead already. It's getting off to a less than stellar
start, but it's very far from dead.

~~~
alanh
> …melodramatic pronunciations of Buzz's death

By "already dead," what I really meant was "Buzz is doomed from a user
experience point of view," not "Buzz is already a ghost town." (And as
cabalamat guesses, there is probably some wishful thinking involved.)

~~~
cgranade
That makes a lot more sense, but I think that Google will put the money into
fixing the problems you point out. I say that not because I personally like
Buzz, but because Google does seem dedicated to the Buzz service line, and
they aren't stupid. They may do some dumb things at times, but they are not
stupid.

~~~
alanh
I hope you're right.

Still, a lot of my complaints would need to be addressed with significant
changes to the service (changing how we are notified of replies & mentions,
de-coupling Reader & Buzz and perhaps Gmail & Buzz, uncluttering the UI,
showing fewer strangers). I can't think of any Google product that was ever
fundamentally changed on this scale. Wave would be a good example of a service
that could _really_ use a rethinking of the UI (there are at least 4 or 5 ways
to dismiss a Wave: Archive, Mute, Delete, Mark as Read, Mark as Spam, for
example), but it hasn't gotten it, and I am pessimistic that this will ever
happen.

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old-gregg
I dont know about you all, but Buzz makes a lot more sense to me than
Facebook+Twitter combined. My _real_ social network is in my inbox and my Buzz
is exploding with great live discussions I'm having with friends and all sorts
of interesting folks in their addressbooks.

Being gmail-based also provides a natural content filter: somehow gmail
accounts are relatively free of morons who tend to inhabit hotmail/AOL, hence
the advantage of higher quality discussions on Buzz as opposed to Facebook.

That, plus the absense of a silly message length limit make buzz the only
social network I'm using.

~~~
yesimahuman
My best _social_ network is facebook. Most of my friends don't use Gmail or
twitter, but all but one of them are on facebook. I can only assume this is
the norm rather than the exception.

Certain groups of people might find Buzz useful, but I'm sure more won't than
even those who don't find twitter useful (at least twitter has more famous
people on it that others can follow).

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bretpiatt
Buzz is going to die not because of the privacy problems this week but because
it forces you to live in a "Google World". I have a gmail account but it isn't
and won't ever be my primary mailbox. Twitter, Facebook, XMPP based IM are all
open enough and integrate into my current life -- they don't force me to go
live a new one.

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runT1ME
Buzz may or may not be dead, but I prefer it to twitter for every reason you
listed.

I don't want to bother logging into another account to check something, but
since buzz is right there, I'll check it.

The fact that anyone can inline images or video, and in the future other forms
of multimedia content is great.

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mark_l_watson
I am put off by the article's title, but otherwise Alan makes some good
points: I would prefer that Buzz not show the number of new items. I have been
using Buzz like I use Twitter: about 10 minutes a day (each) to take a quick
look for interesting things to read. I'm enjoying Buzz, and as long as it is
easy to completely disable it I don't think that people have much to complain
about.

BTW, a little off topic but: how difficult is it really to remove duplicate
entries in Google Reader and similar aggregators? Even better: recognize which
articles are original and which are just summaries with a link to the original
article. Eliminate duplicates, favoring original articles. (Seems like NGRAMS
or comparing word count statistics might do the trick.)

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Tichy
even though I don't understand buzz very well yet, it seems to be nicely
integrated into Android. Showing buzz on google maps is just a button away.

I wouldn't call it dead yet...

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adrianwaj
when in Buzz, the search field at top becomes "Search Buzz" as opposed to
"Search Mail" -- really fast searches of the whole network. It's far from
dead.

~~~
alanh
That's a cool feature, though the UI is such that I would have never guessed
that if you never told me. Using visual hierarchies would solve this design
problem.

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apower
I don't use it, so it's not a big loss.

