The buzz about Buzz

I realize I’m about a week behind the curve with this post about buzz, but I wanted a little time to get to know the newest of the big G’s “enhancements” before I wrote about it. Google Buzz (not to be confused with BuzzD) aims to be a sort of Facebook/Picasa/Flickr/Twitter/Gmail mashup in one (what google thinks is) tidy package. Unfortunately, it falls short of the mark.

Currently, you can link Youtube, Twitter, flickr, picasa, google reader, google talk status, a web site and what appears to be buzz itself to your buzz account (which is really just a tab in your gmail in box). This is ok, but it doesn’t allow me to add facebook or myspace or any of the other social networking sites I can access through Tweetdeck or socialscope or any number of other apps. Plus, you HAVE to have a gmail account in order to use buzz. So if you’re tied you your ISP’s email, or your ancient hotmail/yahoo email address, unless you sign up for gmail you won’t be buzzing.

One of the other aspects that truly annoys me about buzz is the fact that I get an email for EVERY BUZZ. This is ok, except that it sends me emails about my own buzz’s as well as those I follow. If buzz catches on, I’ll soon be receiving more email from buzz then from anyone else on my contact list. I haven’t found a way to stop this yet, though it seems my mail program is filtering most of the buzz emails out as spam any how.

Unfortunately, I fear Google may have jumped the shark with Buzz like they did with Wave. When wave hit, it was all people could talk about (there were wars over getting invites!) and now, people hardly check their wave inbox at all. Buzz generated a lot of initial interest, until people realized that it was pretty much another service along the same lines of what we already have. True, it does allow for a little quicker response then traditional email, and its a little easier to use then google wave, but is it really needed in this time of twitter, facebook, buzzd and all the others?

If you want to follow me on buzz, check out my Google Profile and let me know what you think about buzz.