I'm a little peeved by the author's parting shot:
"a world where nerd engineers get turned loose in a Montessori preschool, and they have no idea about user interface design and, frankly, they don’t care. " Everything the author does on the internet was created by these "nerd engineers," most with no expertise in UI design.
Petty quibbles aside, though, the author has a point: Google's services recently have appeared to lean toward the Google-serving with the side-effect of helping Google's userbase at large. Of course, they are a for-profit corporation and this is to be expected, but I think everyone was hoping that "don't be evil" really meant "actively pursue the best interests of the internet, even above profit."
On the other hand, I disagree that Buzz specifically is Google simply trying to punch out other social networking sites. Currently there are three basic types of personal communication online: IM, Email, and Facebook/Twitter. GMail has already combined the first two, and I think it makes logical sense to add the third. It's certainly useful, just maybe not useful and better.
Good point on the evil, although I'd have to say I'm a little more than peeved overall with the attacks, if anything the article put me more on Google's side. Yes, Google absorbs startups and imitates any product, but it's competitive edge is the crowd of engineers who say, "Hey, I could do that better". All its expansions are evolutionary, and they take into consideration all the criticism out there better than most others could.
Regardless, if you don't want to Buzz then opt-out, but the competition between Buzz, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest will come down too which are most convenient and affective, followers will take it from there. Right now though, Buzz can easily replace Twitter for me, but theres a way to go before Facebook starts trembling, and I don't think Orcut is joining the show any time soon.
In regards to the first point, I felt like he was making a distinction between what he's calling "nerd engineers" (perhaps poorly chosen) -- with no design sense or care for UI -- and other engineers, who carefully think out their interfaces.
Perhaps I am in the large minority but so far I have found Buzz to be engaging and quite useful. I wanted to try out a local restaurant and put the question to Buzz and received eight insightful responses in less than an hour. I enjoy it and I think it has plenty of "stickiness" as a lot of my non-technophobe friends are already using it quite heavily.
I actually think you aren't a minority. Many of my tech/web-less-literate friends are already using Buzz and liking it; it's mostly the techies and web developers and programmers that are saying "Oh, it'll fail like Wave" and "It's stupider than twitter and facebook, it'll die instantly".
I agree. I'm finding it more useful than I thought I would. That it's integrated with gmail is a big part of it. Keyboard shortcuts work, and conversations I'm a part of show up in my inbox. I know Wave is about much more, but this may be all I wanted from it.
Yeah me too, and that was fast! I'm already so much more connected with a few people than I was a couple days ago. It's the difference between cool and warm with some acquaintances.
I used to be a hater toward FB and the like, but it's actually worked to make things a lot warmer with a lot of people, and I've really enjoyed it.
I see a lot of people still struggling with it, and of course others for whom it's just not interesting. I think more people should step out and try it though. It's social network virginity, and learning to be more open online is nerve-wracking at first, and fires up self-consciousness bigtime, but the outcome has been much more worth it than I expected.
Especially for those of us who've done a fair bit of contracting and city moves for jobs, that's meant a lot of upheaval and loss of friends and closeness, and it takes a long time to replace. I think that gets easier, and less valuable relationships are lost.
I am finding it to be an extension of some the great sharing and commenting that was happening around Google Reader. Sort of a hacker news between my contacts.
Like many of these things, if you are "friends" with lots of idiots, it's not going to be that useful. If you are friends with lots of smart people, you get some really cool stuff sent your way.
The first time I opened Buzz, I saw random thoughts from people in my neighborhood. If you're asking for restaurant suggestions, that's going to be far more helpful than Twitter, where you need to have people following you or searching for something in your tweet for people to ever see it.
I think what GMail did for conversations in email,GBuzz does for conversations in Twitter. The @reply mechanism and the retweet convention never really worked well for me in Twitter, although that may be because I was not using the necessary third party tooling to visualize it.
Also, you can add more than 140 characters, real links, pictures, etc. You lose some of the public version of SMS feel that Twitter has, but those constraints were becoming more of an annoyance to me.
First, while still having some little bugs, the gmail integration is done really good. That's probably the best thing after looking at buzz for one day.
Second, is this Author pretending to be knowledgable of tech? This blog post is one of the worst informed posts i've seen so far. On a technology he is pretending to know about. I mean the part about Google Wave. He should know, that Wave is not really intended for real use nowadays. There isn't even a client protocol done by the developers! That should tell you about the early state of wave. There also is no federation, i don't see other wave servers connected to google wave popping up. Without a client protocol and several running wave servers, Wave is just tech preview thing, not more.
Third, he probably has missed the new century. People can complain over social networks, but he may have missed that social networks are overtaking mail and IM in terms of communication channel at the young users, the internet population of tomorrow. In that way, integrating buzz with gmail is a _perfect_ fit! That some old guy is complaining will be something we laugh at in a few years.
Anyway, not one point of constructive/objective critisism in this blog post, just "ohhh, i'm scared, i don't want that new stuff, i want my old mail back!!". Why doesn't he unfollow his pre setup followers and be done with it? It's not like Google forces him to read status updates of his friends. All in all, the post is a shame for a blog post that is supposed to be about new technology.
The oddest thing about Buzz was that it's automatically following everybody I've ever conversed with using GMail, whether or not I know them. They successfully avoided the "nobody's here" problem that Wave had, but by opting in everybody who uses GMail, it created the opposite problem.
Really? I was only automatically following my real friends.
I keep my full address book in Google Contacts (1000+ ppl, including long-gone friends/workmates/classmates). Perhaps because I use Gmail as my main personal account it was able to figure out who was who.
Heh, interesting, I'd say it definitely was made to jump start off of Gmail users, works well for everyone I know, but looks like there are exceptions.
Well, you do still need to click the "start" button. There is a "no thanks" link right on the Buzz intro page. Technically that's an opt-in system. They've just made opting in ridiculously simple.
Not for me, my buzz is empty, and I've conversed with others using gmail before. My gmail address book, however, is probably empty, since I don't use that.
Indeed, after taking a quick look at Buzz, I scrolled down to the bottom of gmail and clicked "turn off buzz". Who needs more of this stuff in their life?
I'm pretty annoyed that my kids' email accounts suddenly turned into a social networking site - there's a reason I don't let them have Facebook accounts.
This is the first valid complaint I have read. Although I don't agree with your views, I do understand them, and I appreciate the fact that you didn't talk about problems which can be easily fixed by an off button.
Which of my views do you disagree with? Prior to yesterday, GMail was an entirely appropriate way for a child to communicate with family and school friends, as far as I can tell. Now it's far too easy for that child to inadvertently reveal personal information to the entire Internet.
I believe that instead of stopping one's kids from giving out personal information (unless they have a disorder- then it may be necessary), one should teach his or her children what is appropriate: to speak and to write => in public and in private- to family - to friends - to acquaintances - to strangers.
All of that should be taught. Show the child why things are bad rather than simply stopping them. If your child doesn't listen, then more extreme measures of censorship should come into play.
I believe that instead of automotive safety belts, we should all just teach people to drive slower and more cautiously. That we we are not encumbered by restrictive seat belts. Reasonable?
Takeaway: Take everything that you just said and then add parental controls on top of it because children really do need boundaries while they learn to think for themselves and hopefully make good decisions.
That kind of thinking is a great way to bring up children who remain irresponsible for their own behavior. Growing up I was responsible for everything I did, and now I'm quite tired of college classmates who still haven't learned to take accountability for basic things.
Something that can be very easy to forget until you concretize the question is that "children" is not a monolithic category.
I have no particular intention of locking down my 15-year old (in 13 years) with serious parental controls. But not all children are 15. Letting a 4-year-old run around loose on the Internet with no protection sounds like a bad idea to me. Which do you prefer, simply telling a 6-year-old "No internet access for you!", or drawing some boundaries but letting them roam within them freely?
"Someday, your children will need to be able to live without Mommy and Daddy saving them from everything!" is not an argument for throwing your 5-year-old out on the street.
Yes but at 12 you may not be able to reason with your head, and if you do something you are not supposed to do, your parents will pay for it, so they're still responsible for you. It's the law (at least where I live).
That's very vague. Children may not be able to reason, that is true; however, I was taught to never talk to strangers, never leave with strangers, never take my favorite pokemon card from a stranger, never do anything I don't want to explain to the paramedics, never say something I wouldn't want to say to someone's face, never say naughty things. You get the idea. I never really went through a "swearing phase" either. Occasionally, I do swear, but I don't (and never did) drop f bombs every ten minutes like lots of people have. I never swore on Facebook because I wouldn't want people to read that. I never wrote a private conversation on someone's wall(public message board), through a message(email), or through an instant message- always did things like that in person. You will never see me do things like that, I mean- I might swear occasionally nowadays, but that's as bad ass as I get ;p (and it's usually for comic effect anyways).
To cover what I said:
1) I have remained in control of my "virtual" life my entire life.
2) I have never made a mistake of telling someone I don't know anything important about me
3) I believe if I can do it, others can too.
Bull. You're trusting everyone on the internet to not abuse the information you gave out.
At best in this case, it's just everyone you know / email with. How many people you communicate with can be trusted online with all the information you give them? Most people use 2 or 3 passwords total! What if they lose control of their accounts? And when was the last time someone got in trouble for info they put on Facebook? Minutes ago? Seconds? The internet is arguably more dangerous than driving, though you're less likely to die, you instead just lose everything. I've had more viruses than car crashes (zero).
I see a key difference between driving cars and interacting on Internet, besides the nature of the dangers: it is important to know how to act on Internet without censorship, whereas I don't see the point of knowing how to drive without a seatbelt.
Now it can be discussed whether temporary censorship is a good pedagogic tool, which is the heart of the disagreement here, but the seatbelt analogy doesn't hold water.
I personally tend to believe into responsibiling rather than censorship, because:
- most censorships don't work well and get healthy kids to react against them; there's nothing worse than foolishly relying on a censorship that doesn't work.
- I tend to believe that when you trust people, they try very hard to be trustworthy.
- Our society is deresponsibilising everyone (it's the microwave vendor's fault if you're dumb enough to microwave your cat); giving a sane sense of responsibility to my kids is probably one of the best competitive edge I can give them in life.
- I'm ideologically libertarian when it comes to ideas, free speech and communications (not so much when it comes to economy, but that's off-topic)
> I tend to believe that when you trust people, they try very hard to be trustworthy.
Maybe "people" (individuals) do. Yet this trust is exactly what black-hats tap when they social engineer an email recipient into visiting a malware site.
The appropriate question here is: do you have kids? This should be an obligatory statement (similar to IANAL) when you publicly question the way someone else is raising their kids.
Most people who don't have kids (myself included) think they can still have valid opinions on child rearing. The more appropriate question to ask would be, "Have you tried this, and did it work?"
Until you have kids... most people who have kids think that your opinions aren't really valid.
I don't intend for that to sound mean. Sure, you can have your opinions, but there is so much that goes into raising a kid that you just can't know beforehand that you can't make an informed opinion. So, knowing if you have kids sets the level of expectations.
I think that it's fair to say that you can describe 'principles', but talking about putting those into practice is where people (such as myself), get touchy. This is especially true when you criticize someone else's choices.
Another way of putting it is this: In theory, there is no difference between theory in practice. In practice, there is.
While true, that there is a risk to expose personal information to the internet you probably should start to educate your kids in internet usage and not deny them.
You sentence "GMail was an entirely appropriate way for a child to communicate with family and school friends, as far as I can tell" shows that you are still living in the 20th century.
"As far as i can tell" means "i didn't ask them but i don't use facebook and email works, so it works for them too". Did you really ask your kids if their friends communicate over social networks?
You probably did miss it (too busy complaining and fearing?) but social networks are overtaking mail. You don't expect your kids to write their friends mail when everyone else is writing messages in facebook, do you? You will see, that your kids will get access to facebook/whatever anyway, if not only out of despite.
I see nothing wrong with allowing my kids to use social networking sites once I feel confident they're mature enough to accept the responsibility for managing their own privacy (and, in fact, my older child does already, although only on sites that allow pseudonyms for now). My observation is simply that use of email requires an entirely different understanding of privacy concerns than use of Twitter or Facebook, and that the default settings Google Buzz sets up are neither especially obvious (I had to hunt around for a while to figure out what was actually displayed to the public via Google Profile) nor what I would recommend for a minor.
Again: I have no problem with educating my children about the proper use of social networking sites. I simply don't appreciate being forced to do so by a service which they've been able to use without these sorts of concerns since they were old enough to read.
It's easy to inadvertently reveal personal information to the entire internet using email. Claire Swire, Peter Chung, Trevor Luxton and countless others can vouch for this. The point-to-point nature of mail communication (and text messaging for that matter) gives an unfortunate illusion of privacy, yet publication and mass replication are only a couple of clicks away.
Posting on openly public sites such as Twitter and Facebook actually forces a lot more careful consideration up front. The sober reality is that you and your children should be treating the private emails you send in the same manner.
What happens when they get old enough to make such a decision for themselves and find themselves unprepared?
Education > protection.
(and this is from someone who was given extremely limited web access till the age of about 16 - and then promptly did some very silly things.... so take it from experience :))
I understand the complaint, but in this day and age, that's like being annoyed that your microwave and VCR have clocks. Everything is a social networking site now. I had to think for a minute in order to not include some form of profiles and user-to-user messaging in the last app I wrote.
I think it's just a generation gap, though—being younger, I grew up without any expectation of privacy from strangers, and I don't see anything wrong with that, really. I know that everyone else has just as many trite details floating around about them as I do, so there's no reason to single me out. It's like the sociological warfare of cars getting a steering-wheel-locking device/alarm/what have you, but in reverse: every person that removes their car's security is one more person reducing the probability that my car will be the one to get stolen.
That's fine until ten years from now someone really wants to make an ass out of you -- not your friends, not random people, but you -- and go on a digging spree.
That sort of security by obscurity only works until someone starts looking with a specific thing in mind.
* Rips the clock out of the vcr. *, That was fun, great analogy, but how do the generational gaps get jumped? Intereestingly enough it's pretty easy for me to rip Buzz out of Gmail, its the constant "he doesn't get it" whispering that bugs people. Everyone tries to advertise to new users, but its hard to do without seeming unnecessary or even evil to so many. I had the same observation of twitter, but they weren't part of millions of users email. I think Google will get over the evil hump this time though, for now it looks like an inevitable backlash to how fast they are growing a user base.
"Then came Twitter, which is mostly pointless, since I really don’t care what anyone else is doing at any particular moment and have no desire to tell others what I’m doing either, but again I joined, mostly because if I didn’t get on Twitter I’d look like someone who doesn’t “get it,” as they say in the Valley, and in my line of work that’s a bad reputation to have."
If that's indeed how people are judging him, this article is not going to help his 'reputation'.
I absolutely understand somebody not using a service (I don't use facebook). But that whole paragraph gives me very little confidence that this is an opinion I should listen to. It could be written by my 50-year-old uncle who's "in IT".
"It could be written by my 50-year-old uncle who's "in IT"."
What does that mean? Does your 50-year-old uncle exist? I am 48 and I am "in IT" and I work mostly with men between the ages of 21 and 27. Despite their youth, their very long/very short hair, and their t-shirts, some of them are genuine fuddy-duddies (old-fashioned, conservative, set in their thinking, however you want to call it). The chief focus of their conservatism is an almost religious adherence to doctrine, to how things have been so far in their very short lifetimes.
Here's what someone my age thinks: Google has introduced a "service" that politely adds to the annoyance of our lives. If google cared about what users wanted, they would be improving their core business, search, which is becoming increasingly polluted by spam.
I think there may be a spot, say in the mid 20s, where you become emotionally committed to a particular technology stack and everything else is compared against that reference. So there is quite often quite a lot of stiction there to move to a new stack.
When I was in my mid 20s (nearly 20 years ago) I was developing in Common Lisp and PostScript. And while I am still very fond of those technologies, once I left an academic environment I didn't really have much option but to go for a sequence of, comparatively mundane, platforms.
(Empirically) statistically, though, the 50+ age group is significantly less up-to-date with internet fads than the below-50 group. Yes, there are exceptions, but a quick glance will inform anyone of the same comparison.
That said, early-20s here, and I'm turning off Buzz. I'm also out of FB. Which makes me one of the oddballs for my age group.
First, I do not have the statistics, though now I have supporting statistics. Such a claim cannot be accurately quantified, so not only can I not ever have such statistics, I only claimed that it could be discovered empirically - essentially, by looking at what is, instead of requiring hard fact.
Fastest growth implies nothing without a scale to start with. If there's one 100+ year old on Facebook, and in a single day two more get added, they've got a projected growth rate of over 70,000% per year. Skewed and unmaintainable statistics are effectively worthless.
Look further down the page, especially at the pie chart showing FB use by age group. 45+ amounts to 8% of users (55+ only 3%). The 18-25 group, which I'm in, amounts to 43% single-handedly.
The 45+ group is growing faster than others because they're years behind everyone else, and typically fewer join at all than the earlier adopters. QED.
I get the feeling that all of Google's products were invented for Google to help streamline the way it does things. Gmail, Wave, GChat, Reader ... all of these things have the feel of "we didn't like what was existing in the ecosystem, so we made our own the way we like it."
I doubt that Google ever had the problem "how do we best show ads to internal email users". GMail was marketware from the start. That's neither good nor bad in and of itself, but let's be honest about why Google does anything.
"Why does Buzz even exist? Is it because Google wants to make my life better in some way? No. Buzz exists because Google feels threatened by Twitter and Facebook and wants to kill them. Google has become what Microsoft used to be—the Borg, the company that gobbles up ideas from smaller rivals and cranks out lame imitations in an attempt to put the little guys out of business." - he nailed it
If the imitation is lame, then that's too bad. But if it becomes better over time and is more open, then that'll be a good thing.
It's always surprising how people can on one hand deplore how closed Facebook is, and how it doesn't have competition and is just becoming a big monopolistic walled-garden, and then when more open competition arrives, they whine that there are too many social networks and that someone else than Google should've done it (oh yeah, who else has the installed user base to compete with Facebook and Twitter?).
That definitely is a difficult position for Google to be in, hence they need not to rush with such important decisions as privacy inside the email application.
good technology but the first thing I looked for was how to make people unfollow me. It's simply stupid how they forget privacy and only look at the _buzz_ it brings. I will turn it off for now.
Go to your contacts and make a new group. Add the people you want to let follow you. Change your privacy settings so that only people in that group can see your "buzz."
Not really intuitive, but I think that's the "official" way to do it.
I completely disagree. Sure it's easy to take pot shots at companies like Google as soon as they get a little too big/powerful for their britches however to really understand Google's importance, at least one crucial aspect, look at what's going on in China, and now Iran, and somewhat unbelievably now Australia (who apparently are trying to emulate China.)
Systems of real-time communication are critical infrastructure and the ongoing debate over freedom and privacy serves the lesson that there are no easy answers. We do know however that there is an especially interesting, if complex, relationship between technological systems and political freedom and that this is an issue of growing importance.
In short, while Buzz may compete with Twitter (or Facebook) and while a certain number will still use it to tell you what they had for lunch or forward the 2010 equivalent of an email chain letter meme, the reality is that it is just another piece of the puzzle in the emerging web of global communications infrastructure, and has much more far-reaching implications.
I saw a pretty telling comment on a friend's buzz imported from twitter:
"I'm glad that I can get a glimpse of the twitter life, and not actually have to figure out another social networking thing. Yay!"
This was striking to me. It seems like this Twitter outsider does not view Buzz - something in her gmail - as "another social networking thing." Maybe this looks different to those of us on the outside.
here in Zürich, Switzerland, the map is exploding with buzzes of various people all over the place. Sometimes there's even conversation happening between complete strangers, which, trust me on that, is totally uncommon here in Switzerland :-)
In so far, buzz seems to have had a huge impact in the society I live in, so I'm happy.
The very aggressive binding to the location IMHO really emphasizes location dependent communication over general communication - something I have used Twitter for so far and probably will still be using in the future.
But for little, location dependent things like "don't visit restaurant x right now - it's full" or "it looks like the tram is late", buzz is incredibly useful and being heavily used for around here.
That it also spawns conversation between strangers is a nice additional benefit.
Product Manager Todd Jackson who presented Buzz seemed really smart and enthusiastic, and that's a really good start for Buzz. There is a need for this type of stream-based social networking.
I think the biggest factors in Buzz's success will be:
- can Google monetize it: they should do the things that Twitter won't in this respect.
- will the API be easy enough and presented simply enough for novices to use (eg like Twitter) - but also be complex enough for advanced usage: eg, easy location based stuff
- can they fully break it out of the Gmail Silo and make it a standalone service. Why not create a new product with independent name, Microsoft Live became Bing. Google Buzz becomes _____
- can they integrate it with Google Apps email interfaces rather than just GMail
most importantly
- will they keep engineers and many resources on it, taking in feedback and iterating
Buzz should be Google's own starting point for leading into Wave. I think they should turn Wave into the all encompassing aggregator of everything. Then, throw that whole package into Chrome, as opposed to Wave standalone, make it clean/fast, and it would be pretty fun to use. I'd be in Chrome all day without having to load any other social site
As with most of these things I think it's pretty hard to say whether it's worthwhile until it's been out in the wild for a while. Many people looked at Twitter and thought it was useless initially ("140 characters? Ha!") and that wasn't an accurate prediction.
As far as I can tell, it is filling a tab on my inbox with random messages from people I've never heard of (though presumably are in my email address book or something), saying things like "I am testing Buzz."
Presumably you accepted the default suggested people to follow. Go to the buzz tab, unfollow anyone you don't immediately recognize, and it becomes like facebook except integrated into gmail and only for people you actually communicate with.
Improve your life? I don't think anyone can answer that yet - it depends how people end up using it. And if you decide you don't like it, opt out.
Yeah, but there's the rub. I unfollowed everybody it would allow me to, but there's still a couple people there without "unfollow" in the dropdown list of options.
They're marked "Twitter - Public" instead of "Buzz - Public", which is probably the reason they're un-unfollowable. Unfortunately, they're also the loudest and most innane of the bunch.
I'm just sad that they don't have it for apps yet. I'd like to start using it, but then if it does become available for the email address that I actually use (and that people know about) I don't want to have to start all over.
I understand you do not wish to use social networking sites. We all get that from the article.
Instead of turning off buzz you complain about how complicated it is. Who wants to bet me money he didn't spend ten minutes on buzz before deciding it was crap?
Why? Why? Why? Why? ... Why would Google be trying to make you feel guilty? That is so ridiculous- I'm not going to comment any further.
Jesus. Stop complaining. Buzz was invented for me. Maybe for Google too. Not aimed for people, however, like you Mr. Tech writer/author.
I want to rant so much and use ad hominem to its full potential but I won't. I have a feeling I've spent more time writing this post than you did looking at Buzz.
If people are going to downvote me, I would appreciate knowing why -other than the fact that I believe the author ignorantly wrote and article, and people don't like to hear what I have to say (sometimes).
Well, I do dislike first impressions because of how judgmental people can be. I would love to take apart the facts of his arguments, but he is just writing opinions and stating features. I'd be wrong to disagree with features, and I dislike his opinions. I believe they are not based off of experience with Buzz but based off of previously held ideals about social networking sites the author has claimed he dislikes. He is applying his view on one thing automatically to another without giving it a shot. He hasn't even given it a couple of days.
So I just checked into buzz and found a work email buzz from someone who's posted nothing and another person who I have no reason to follow or even care about. So until they get like, I dunno, more than 150 passionate users can we let this Orkut 2.0 clone rest easy?
>Then came Twitter, which is mostly pointless, since I really don’t care what anyone else is doing at any particular moment and have no desire to tell others what I’m doing either
I think the idea is to integrate buzz, facebook, twitter all into one inbox in your gmail account so you can respond in the same format you got the message in. So it don't matter if your friend is on fb or twitter or whatever you just go to 1 inbox.
Petty quibbles aside, though, the author has a point: Google's services recently have appeared to lean toward the Google-serving with the side-effect of helping Google's userbase at large. Of course, they are a for-profit corporation and this is to be expected, but I think everyone was hoping that "don't be evil" really meant "actively pursue the best interests of the internet, even above profit."
On the other hand, I disagree that Buzz specifically is Google simply trying to punch out other social networking sites. Currently there are three basic types of personal communication online: IM, Email, and Facebook/Twitter. GMail has already combined the first two, and I think it makes logical sense to add the third. It's certainly useful, just maybe not useful and better.