Personal Computing: Playing With Google Buzz

OK, I’ve succumb to the marketing and taken the plunge with Google’s latest offering; Buzz.  I was mighty disappointed with the Google OS and Google Wave, so my expectations of Buzz weren’t that high.  For the uninitiated and from what I’ve discerned so far, Buzz is targeting itself at Twitter and Facebook/FriendFeed enabling users to produce a news feed in the same way those products already do.

So far, the only benefit of Buzz I can determine is that it can show updates from those around you without following them.  This feature has potential and I can see ways it could be used.  However the wider issue at stake here is whether we need yet another product to tell everyone what we had for dinner.

Keeping up to date can be achieved on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Friends Reunited, classmates.com, MySpace and many other social networking sites.  There’s also instant messaging from Microsoft, Yahoo and others.  There are a dearth of sites offering to help us keep up to date with our location or what we’ve recently purchased.  We even have software to centralise all of those platforms into a single tool, all of which need to co-exist across multiple mobile and fixed devices and computers.  Google, Microsoft and Yahoo like to keep you locked in to their services so prefer (and in some cases require) you to use their email addresses and logins.

Not surprisingly, we have facilities to cross post messages, but these become really annoying when you see the same Twitter messages you just read filling up your Facebook stream.

All in all, keeping up to date via social networks is getting out of hand because:

• We’re having to maintain multiple platforms to ensure we reach everyone – no one platform is enough to guarantee full coverage.  How many Facebook people do you know on Twitter?  How many Twitter friends to you connect to on Facebook?
• We’re cross posting data to ensure nothing gets missed.  This results in blog entries being posted on Twitter and Facebook, which can get really annoying!
• We have to maintain multiple signon profiles, just to stay in touch.

We need a good shakedown in the market to take us back to the one-provider model, or at least, common signon/access methods across all platforms.  Then let each vendor fight it out on usability and features.  Meanwhile, I’m focusing on maybe one two platforms, so don’t expect a quick reply from me on Buzz!

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