Matt Ash

About a year and half ago, when Twitter was starting to become a household name, it was interesting to see how people were completely polarized in their opinion of the micro-messaging service. It was something that was either an impressive new form of communication to be reckoned with, or a silly toy that people with too much time on their hands and not enough real friends used. Having already been a long time Twitter user (joined in Sept. 06), although never a prolific tweeter, I felt somewhat obligated to be my local twitter apologist.

From IM to Buzz

One successful way I found of communicating how it could be seen as “useful”, was to compare it to IM status messages. Since the days of AOL and ICM, IM status messages were a fun and casual way to send short messages to friends. Sometimes they were important, but most of the time they were just funny or even mundane. Twitter I would say, is basically like taking those status messages, putting them in a list, and timestamping them. Actually, that’s exactly what twitter is, with a few more bells and whistles.

With the advent of Google Buzz, Google is finally taking advantage of the fact that people have already been using Gmail, particularly g-chat, as a twitter-like service for years. In fact there are thousands of people that would feel more comfortable engaging on status messages from within Gmail for that exact reason.

Aggregation. Full stop.

Google has one advantage that no one can touch. The ability to aggregate massive amounts of data. They stepped into the social arena, aggregation wise, when they released Google Search with realtime updates. Where Buzz is going to succeed is in its ability to aggregate existing, but not related social data, as well as data that hasn’t been “socialized” yet. This is accomplished from the outset by “connecting” sites to Buzz such as Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader, and Picasa with hopefully more to come. Doing so allows the user to have all of their stuff pulled into a single social sphere without having to deviate from their normal online activity. Its Google doing what it does best.

In a recent “so what’s so great about Buzz anyway” statement made by Microsoft they said the following:

“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”

Microsoft has ignored two important points.

1. Buzz is an aggregation service, which also allows you to post and comment internally.
2. Hotmail hasn’t been cool since 1999, and Live never was.

Open vs. Closed

I like Facebook, but I’ve always had one big problem with it. As one recent blogger puts it, Facebook is the new AOL. Facebook is a “walled garden”. While Facebook is making more efforts to make its information available to the rest of the internet, they’ve done so in a way that has caused privacy to suffer with little benefit to that actual service. The true value of Twitter and its cousins-by-API, is that with proper permission, this data can be accessed and manipulated in a limitless ways. Necessarily, it morphs to match the needs of the market. Google has a long tradition of creating open web services through great APIs, like Google Maps, so I’m hopeful that Buzz will follow suit.

One less tab

By incorporating Buzz into Gmail Google has done something absolutely genius. In one stroke they’ve ensured the success of their product. Aside from promising that every Gmail user will be forced to see that little Buzz logo with a number of unread messages next to it, which they will be forced to click on out of shear neuroticism, they’ve also done the user a service. Users are tired having to have several windows or tabs open at the same time just to keep up with their online conversations. If Buzz had been launched as a distinct website the only people talking about it today would be geeks and the people that read the things that geeks write.

Geolocation is King

What Google Buzz has gotten mostly right is its geolocation implementation. While agree with Mashable’s take on the service’s current deficiencies, being able to “snap” at a given location which corresponds to a Place on Google Maps via its mobile app is awesome functionality. Services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, and most recently Yelp have been innovating in this field, but just like Facebook, they’ve developed closed networks. While I like Foursquare as a concept, Foursquare data is useless, or inaccessible for that matter, outside of Foursquare. Whats more, to take advantage of them you’re forced to cultivate entirely new friend-sets which have to be willing to participate in yet another social network, which may or may not catch on. Again, by utilizing aggregation and integration, Google Buzz has a lot of potential with this feature.

I was disappointed to see that Twitter API Geolocation data wasn’t being pulled into Google Buzz, but hopefully that will be incorporated over time.

The copycat issue

If Google has failed with regards to one thing in launching this service its that it hasn’t presented Buzz in a way that emphasizes the above perspective. By throwing a post box at the top of the screen, the first impression that many get is that Buzz is another take on Facebook, Twitter, and 750 other social networking sites. Perhaps this was inevitable, but Google’s number one challenge is going to be courting an audience that’s tired of being presented with too many options to accomplish the same task.

Conclusion

By including Buzz as an additional part of its already wildly successful Gmail service, Buzz probably already has the exposure it needs to gain significant traction. As Buzz posts pile up in people’s Buzz boxes (I’m still kind of unsure on the correct vocabulary to use here), and as people begin to learn how to incorporate their preexisting Internet usage into Buzz, I think it will have a bright future. Over time it’ll be subject to the same feature and interface driven iterations that Google’s other products receive, and it’ll only get better. I don’t believe in [insert web app]-killers, but I think it’ll be a big player in the years to come.

Its been more then a couple months since I’ve contributed to my blog. I’ve been a bad bad blogger.

During this time countless important things have happened, and I’ve missed many valuable opportunities to shares my thoughts and experiences. In an attempt to rectify this, I’ve come up with a list of blogs that I plan on publishing over the next month. Some of this vital and invaluable topics include the following:

• My Half Yearly Exams
• Two apartments in two months, renting in Armenia
• What I love and do not love about Armenia
• Some Nerdy Stuff
• An web based project I’ve been working on
• Expertise and having it / How you spend your time
• and more…

Also, as a token of my sincerity, I’ve updated the fonts on my website. Do you like them, or are they too gaudy?