Early last week Google began to roll out their new social sharing service “Buzz” to all of their Gmail users. Buzz is a “lifestream” (a lot like your News Feed in Facebook) where everything you are doing is combined with everything those you are “following” are doing, allowing for real-time sharing of Web content, images, status updates, and so forth. It’s pretty nifty in and of itself, considering that Google had also recently created social profiles of all their Gmail users and placed them in Google search results – basically, everything that’s already publicly available about a person through search brought in to one simple profile page (which users can control for privacy, of course). With the profile roll out and Buzz, users can now easily find and follow other people and see what they’re tweeting, what pics they are posting to Flickr, what music they are listening to on Pandora, and on and on.  Almost overnight, Google became one of the largest social networks in the world by turning their search engine in to a makeshift social network.

The only problem is, Google Buzz, the flagship and most critical functional element of this new Google social network, is a horrible mess!

The purpose of Web 2.0 (or whatever buzz word you want to apply to today’s Web innovations) is publishing, aggregating, and filtering.  Content from around the Web that we care about should come together in to simple, constantly updated feeds.  RSS feeds for our blogs help us with simple publication, tools and services like Digg, Google Reader, and Pageflakes help with aggregation of content, and services like search.twitter.com and settings for our Facebook Walls help us to filter for what we want to see.  Now, granted, this is a time of a lot of transition and change in the social space, so these sorts of systems are not perfect, but in general most Internet users have figured out how to filter for what they want with the toys at their disposal.

And now there’s Google Buzz, arriving at the party like some drunk Microsoft application.  Like most new iterations of Windows OS, it’s incredibly powerful, almost everyone is using it (whether they want to or not because it’s in Gmail), and it’s a total disaster of an interface.

Because anyone can follow anyone, comments made to content items in your Buzz feed update in real-time, potentially flooding a buzz item (or, referred to as just a “buzz”) like some never-ending stream of communal consciousness (if you don’t believe me, just follow Mashable in your Buzz to see what I mean – I haven’t seen that much fellating of a product since Apple fanbois went gooey over the iPhone  – plus, everyone commenting sounds REALLY IMPORTANT).  While one can “mute” a buzz, removing it from your stream, there doesn’t appear to be any way of getting it back.  What would be more effective is the ability to collapse a buzz with a really large comment thread going, or to see those completely collapsed automatically, but that’s not possible.

Perhaps the worst offender in all of this is there is no way to filter your Buzz – just because you are following a person on Buzz doesn’t mean you want to see EVERYTHING they post.

Another annoyance (though Gmail filters themselves allow for a workaround) is that once you’ve commented in a Buzz thread, you’re going to get a perpetual stream of emails in your inbox from that thread.  This is especially cumbersome for keeping a clean inbox in third-party clients like MS Outlook or a BlackBerry.

I’m certain Buzz will eventually have columns, collapsible threads, filters, and a way to undo Buzz from the floodtide it creates in your Inbox.  Plus, another feature that would be nice is a way of unsubscribing from individual comment threads (which goes along with keeping that inbox clean).  Apart from these egregious FAILs in the Buzz system, one can’t help but see Buzz as a real game-changer for Twitter and Facebook.  Of course, as soon as Facebook launches a real email interface with POP3/IMAP/SMTP, etc., Google has been very wise to launch Buzz and go after those other giants of social media before they come after Google.  The only problem is, in remembering to publish and aggregate, they totally forgot about filtering, something Twitter and Facebook have been doing effectively for a long time.

For now, Google Buzz is just a mess.

Email

Print

Share

Reblog

Tweet