Archive for the ‘Buzz’ tag
Google Buzz
I’ve been a terribly negligent blogger, but I’ve been saving some things up. First off, let’s talk about Google Buzz, since everyone else is also talking about it.
At this point, I just have my most initial personal reactions to Buzz, plus the mix of confusion and annoyance I’ve seen playing out amidst my own connections. First off, I find it annoying that there’s a lot of duplication. I loves me my Google Reader, and I have started getting things through multiple streams here. That is, when my friends share something through Reader, it shows up in Buzz. And then, if I comment on it (in either format), it then shows up in my Gmail inbox when someone else comments. Then I will also see it when it pops up again in my Reader.
Basically, Google is trying to force me to consolidate things I want to keep separate. Maybe I don’t want to share my comments with everyone in my email book — although Google has conveniently set up me with a group of followers, I use my Gmail account for both work and play. This is just one more way to muck up the line between personal and professional: in the records business, there can be serious consequences when these divisions are blurred. (Think of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.) Google Buzz isn’t creating this problem, of course — it’s just one more tool that could make it easier. The privacy settings with Buzz are also a bit fuzzy — I don’t like when it is hard to opt out, rather than just easy to opt in.
Buzz has been called Google’s response to Twitter. See, one of the brilliant things about Twitter is its simplicity: you use it to do one very simple thing. Of course, you can use those 140 characters for a lot of different purposes, and you can incorporate them in diverse ways, but the root is simple.
All this being said, I know I can be stubborn with new tools. I was slow to get into aggregators, because I really liked to go to separate websites and catch up on my blogs periodically. But, thanks to a gentle push, I gave Google Reader a try and now I just adore it. So, we’ll see.
