Google Buzz has been out for almost 3 months now and I think it is time to take another look. I find that I am not using Google Buzz and I think there are a few design decisions that have hampered its acceptance.
Privacy
Clearly Google biffed their original roll out with all sorts of bad privacy choices and defaults, but it seems that they have learned from their mistakes and have fixed most of the issues. That is at least better than one large social networking company (which rhymes with acebook) that keeps making bad decisions in the privacy area.
My Login is My Email
The one area of privacy that has not been addressed is that Google took a social network and made the public handle for me my email address. Every single update to Google Buzz is a message to the world what your email address is. Now I built and ran online communities since 1996 and we never had a customer who chose to make the email address the public user name for their community. As your email address is available publically it opens you up to more spam. Google Buzz only has that issue to the extent that your updates are public and can be scraped by bots. But, if you are not selective about who you add to your social graph then expect more spam.
I Don’t Follow Popular People
One thing I did not expect is that I have stopped following anyone who has a popular following. Google decided in Buzz that anytime someone replies to someone I follow that the reply belongs in my update feed. That means when I followed Robert Scoble or Chris Pirillo, to name two, my buzz feed was now just about them. Anyone less popular was lost in the noise. I don’t get that issue on twitter. Now communities and message boards have dealt with those issues for many years. Most message board systems provide different ways of filtering information. They usually show me just the threads in a discussion and let me know which ones have new replies and don’t require that I get all updates for every post. I think that Google could learn something from some of these older methods. Maybe I should only get updates after I have commented or maybe they can give me an option of telling them which discussions I want to follow. This is not a new problem. There are proven solutions.
Do You Want Community In My Email?
I am not a big gmail user so I don’t know the answer to the last question. Is my inbox the best place to put a social network? With so many people overwhelmed by keeping up with their email, is Google Buzz just the wrong place to be social?
by Chris Christensen
I am the Director of Engineering for TripAdvisor.com/Flights. I am also the host of the Amateur Traveler. The Amateur Traveler is an online travel show that focuses primarily on travel destinations and what are the best places to travel to. It includes both a weekly audio podcast, a video podcast, and a blog.2 Responses to “So Far, Google Buzz Doesn’t Work for Me”
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Tags: google
Chris Christensen
Says:May 4th, 2010 at 1:04 pm
Linda Lawry has a great post on how to use Google Buzz at http://www.google.com/buzz/lslawrey/3R3tj2FhFAY/What-Makes-Buzz-ROCK-And-Work-For-ME-I-Was-Asked-I
But, she mentioned my name using the @Chris Christensen link in a comment and I was automatically subscribe to the discussion. By mentioning me I got an email to this discussion and continued to get updates every time someone commented about it. Seriously I thing the Buzz folks have some truly great ideas but I also wonder sometimes just what they are thinking and this is the later.
The emails I am getting from them are actually quite literally illegal under the canned spam act. I did not ask for them and they don’t contain an unsubscribe link.
Chris Christensen
Says:May 7th, 2010 at 10:02 am
One other issue that has come up is that the conversation on Linda’s otherwise excellent post has just turned silly but I can’t remove myself from that string of emails without removing my self from all replies to threads that I have contributed to.