Poor Google social media smart guys. They have sooooo much momentum and so much "buzz" around anything they launch and yet they really have not had a home run. And it's not that they haven't tried, they have: case Orkut = sharable profile. Jaiku = Twitter wanna be, and most recently the service I can't even get the advocates for the service to really respond to: WAVE.
So now enter BUZZ. Ho hum. Are you surprised that it doesn't sync with Facebook yet? Are you really surprised by that?
FastCompany tries to make news out of the launch, but comes up short with this scoring.
1. Media Integration: Buzz wins simply because it's easier to connect than Facebook. Well, at least to Picassa and Flikr and Twitter. (I'd actually score this for Facebook, cause you can integrate almost every account.)
2. Interface: Facebook wins. (Ha ha, we'll get to Facebook's new interface violations in a bit.)
3. Fun Factor: Facebook wins. (Yeah, it's a social thing after all. FB has games, causes, pages… Buzz has… well, g-mail.)
Okay so what's so great about buzz?
1. It's from Google. (Okay I think we've established that the Google umbrella offers little in terms of will we use it, will people flock to the party if we build a new party room bolted on the side of gmail?
2. Nobody's on it yet. (Are we really ready to start building our social networks again, on another service? Well, are you?)
3. It's got the big "so what" tag on it. What does buzz actually do that is interesting, unique or more efficient?
It might really be more of a competitor to Tweetdeck and Seesmic as a megaphone for initiating your tweets, bleeps, pings, wall scrivings and giving you some Google love in the process. *Might be.*
So what's the resistance?
Or for me, what's the value of spending time putting together my profile and my connections on Buzz? At the moment I don't see it. And I AM an early adopter, but not necessarily an early evangelist.
The part of Google I discovered last night when the "See Buzz in your G-Mail Account" link was not doing anything was this.
They might not get my mindshare with Buzz, but they got my Blackberry coming and going. I could care less about Buzz, frankly. But I want the WAVE to work, I just can't find anyone else quite as passionate about the WAVE as I am. At least not in my limited WAVE-lets here in Austin, Texas.
Let's see if anyone uses WAVE at SXSWi this year. I'm pretty sure you won't hear a word about Buzz. And I'm pretty sure you will still hear too much about iPhone apps and APIs and Twitter-enabled apps.
I can't wait to see how this pans out. Buzz – meh. WAVE – bring it!
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/you-buzz
Interesting note: Since I use FriendFeed to integrate all of my social networks, I wonder if I can add my BUZZ to FF yet? Or how soon will a WordPress plug-in like Sociable add BUZZ as a new option? Let's see: Jan 10, 2010, 6:24 CST.
