The Buzz on Google Buzz

February 10th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk

Ok, this is the one and (hope­fully) only post that I’m going to make regard­ing Google Buzz. Google Buzz will suc­ceed if, and only if, it can steal a large major­ity of main­stream users from Twitter/Facebook. Note that, by “main­stream users” I don’t mean New Media Douchebags like Scoble, Arrington, Winer, et al. I mean your par­ents, the barflies at my pub, and the vapid tarts in the local sorority.

No amount of whiz-bang tech­nol­ogy, or “mind-share,” or the adop­tion of so-called influ­en­tials will mean fuck-all unless Google can engage the masses. My money is that they can’t.

That said, in the inter­ests of see­ing how this all pans out, my pro­file is http://​www​.google​.com/​p​r​o​f​i​l​e​s​/​d​l​i​n​e​s13.

4 comments - (Comments closed)
«  
  »
  • bkhar­mony

    That’s a whole new kind of ugly.

    Google don’t want my advice, I know. But there comes a point they need to allow some design­ers at the table. That point was passed a cou­ple years ago.

    No one will use that Windows 2000-looking hunk of garbage. And con­sid­er­ing how much peo­ple are sick of facebook’s con­stant for­mat changes, func­tion­al­ity changes and pri­vacy igno­rance — Google is blow­ing a great opportunity.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    This is so true. I’m mak­ing an attempt at using Buzz just so that I can give it a fair shake, but it’s lit­er­ally painful. Case in point, the Buzz frame is only themed to match the default Gmail theme. Any other and it looks like ass.

    But the real point is the one that you allude to, Buzz is very obvi­ously built by engi­neers, for engi­neers. As much as peo­ple whine and com­plain when Twitter or Facebook change things, you can’t really argue that their inter­faces are par­tic­u­larly com­pli­cated.

    The other thing that will absolutely kill Buzz if Google doesn’t change it is the lack of a pub­lic API. I don’t want to have a Gmail win­dow open to use Buzz. In my opin­ion, that was a large part of why FriendFeed never took off with the masses: lack of 3rd party apps.

  • paule­hoff­man

    FYI, I went to add you to my “fol­low” list by enter­ing “angry drunk” in the “Search Profiles” box. It came up with 17 peo­ple, none of them you. Better yet, the top choices include some­one in mid­dle school and a “dancer at Disney”.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    Well, Google knows fuck-all about The Angry Drunk, which goes to show that dis­cov­ery is some­thing of a prob­lem as of yet. Meanwhile the link in the post goes to my profile.