Google Buzz Vs FAcebook

Now, not all current Gmail users have Buzz integrated yet into their Gmail account, but they’re rolling it out to everyone as quick as they can.

I honestly don’t know if I’ll use Buzz at all. There’s always a “new” thing with Google and until I hear that it’s working wonders in some way with others, then I’ll be pretty slow to jump on the bandwagon. I only have so much time in my day and if I jumped on every new Google release I wouldn’t get anything done.

Now…if they do decide to integrate your Facebook contacts, and allow you to create lists of people so that you can only update those lists, I’ll definitely take a second look (but…maybe they do; again I don’t know because I don’t yet have it in my Gmail account).

Have you gotten “Buzzed” yet in your Gmail account?
 
When you first go into Google Buzz, it automatically sets you up with followers and people to follow.

A Google spokesperson tells us these people are chosen based on whom the users emails and chats with most using Gmail.

That's fine.

The problem is that -- by default -- the people you follow and the people that follow you are made public to anyone who looks at your profile.

In other words, before you change any settings in Google Buzz, someone could go into your profile and see the people you email and chat with most.

A Google spokesperson asked us to phrase this claim differently. Like this: "In other words, after you create your profile in Buzz, if you don't edit any of the default settings, someone could visit your profile and see the people you email and chat with most (provided you didn't edit this list during profile creation)."
 
When you first post to Google Buzz, there is a dialogue box that reads "Before participating in Buzz, you need a public profile with your name and photo."

It also says -- albeit in tiny gray letters against a white background, "Your profile includes your name, photo, people you follow, and people who follow you."

But it does not say that these publicly viewable follower lists are made up of people you most frequently email and chat with.

Even if it did say that, we doubt most users bother to read the text in the dialogue box before clicking "save profile and continue."

(This is why it's always safest for Web services providers to make it so sharing information is always an "opt-in," rather than "opt-out," setting. Just ask Facebook, which still remembers Beacon.)

There is also a "Welcome To Buzz" panel that shows who you are following and who is following you. In a long bit of unbolded text, it says "Buzz is a new way to share updates, photos, videos and more, and start conversations about the things you find interesting. You're already set up to follow the people you email and chat with the most."

If a user notices the box, it might help users "catch" that they might be following people they don't want the world to know they're following. But you don't have to close the box to use Buzz. Closing the box does not trigger a warning or anything else that alerts the user they've agreed to publish a list of the people they email and chat with most.
 
The whole point is: Google should just ask users: "Do you want to follow these people we've suggested you follow based on the fact that you email and chat with them? Warning: This will expose to the public who you email and chat with most." Google should not let users proceed to using Buzz until they click, "Yes, publish these lists."

In my profession -- where anonymous sourcing is a crucial tool -- the implications of this flaw are terrifying.

But it's bad for others too. Two obvious scenarios come to mind:

* Imagine if a wife discovering that her husband emails and chats with an old girlfriend a ton.
* Imagine a boss discovers a subordinate emails with executives at a competitor.
 
A Google spokesperson tells us the followers lists are public by default so that people can quickly find new people to follow. Obviously, that's a good thing for Google, which is hoping to get as many people using Google Buzz as soon as possible. It's also meant to be helpful for users. And for those who are unconcerned with telling the world who they email most, it is. But for everyone else, it's terrible.

It gets to a deeper problem with Google Buzz: It's built on email, which is a very different Internet application than a social network.

The good news for Google is that this is a very easy problem to fix. Google must either shut off auto-following, or it must make follower lists private by default as soon as possible.
 
A Google spokesperson tells us the followers lists are public by default so that people can quickly find new people to follow. Obviously, that's a good thing for Google, which is hoping to get as many people using Google Buzz as soon as possible. It's also meant to be helpful for users. And for those who are unconcerned with telling the world who they email most, it is. But for everyone else, it's terrible.

It gets to a deeper problem with Google Buzz: It's built on email, which is a very different Internet application than a social network.

The good news for Google is that this is a very easy problem to fix. Google must either shut off auto-following, or it must make follower lists private by default as soon as possible.
 
Update: We've updated this post to emphasize that there are a few instances where Google does allow users to opt-out of inadvertently publishing a list of the people they email and chat with most.

We continue to believe these chances to opt-out do not force the user to make a real choice about this setting.

We believe Google could and should simply make this feature "opt-in" so that people know what they're doing.

We're stunned the people at Google don''t agree. We bet they change their minds.

On that point, here's a statement from Google:

"We thought very carefully about how to create a great experience in Google Buzz with as minimal setup as possible. We designed our auto-following system to enable users to immediately see content from the people they email and chat with most, so when they start using Buzz, it "just works." If users are automatically followed to anyone they'd rather not follow, it's easy to remove these individuals during the auto-following step by clicking on the "edit" link and then clicking "unfollow" next to their names.

After that, the first time the user creates a post or comment, we ask them to create a profile, principally so they have a name to display next to their post. There's more information on why you need a profile here: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=17073. In this profile creation step, we inform users that the lists of people they follow and people following them will be displayed on their profile, and make it easy to view and edit these lists. We also make it possible to hide the lists of people they're following and people following them from their profile."
 
When I first heard about Google Buzz, I was worried that I might be seeing the birth of another "me too" product. After all, everyone wants a piece of the Twitter halo. But with the release of Buzz today, you can see how Google has taken the social media lessons of Twitter and applied them to their own core products.

I'm especially fond of Gmail Buzz, which adds the power of asymmetric following to email.

AWESOME idea. There are many of us for whom email is still our core information console, and our most powerful and reliable vehicle for sharing ideas, links, pictures, and conversations with the people who constitute our real social network. But up till now, we could only share with explicitly specified individuals or groups. Now, we can post messages to be read by anyone. Sergey Brin said that Buzz gives the ability "to post a message without a 'to' line." That's exactly right - something that in retrospect is so brilliantly obvious that it will soon no doubt be emulated by every other cloud-based email system.
 
Buzz items can be shared directly in Gmail, but are also pulled in from other social sharing sites, including Twitter, Picasa, YouTube, and Flickr.

What's particularly cool is that the people you "follow" are auto-generated for you out of your email-based social network. If you communicate with them, they are the seed for your buzz cloud. Over time, as you like or dislike buzz entries from that network, the buzz cloud adapts.

Google has also done a neat hack on the Twitter @name syntax, allowing you to prefix @ to an email address to have a message show up for sure in that user's Gmail Inbox. Saying @[email protected] (or @[email protected]) will put a message into foo's Buzz cloud in the same way as saying @foo does on Twitter, but it will also show up in their Gmail Inbox, to make sure they see it. You can also make messages private to only named recipients or groups. (I love this - right now, I have two Twitter accounts, one for public sharing, and another for private sharing.)
 
I've always found it perplexing that vendors who manage pieces of our communications network for us - our email, IM, and phone - have failed to build social networking features into their products. Google is clearly now tackling that job, increasingly making its communication products into a powerful social media platform. Gmail already includes IM and some automatic social learning in the address book; adding Buzz makes it that much more powerful. And the fact that whatever you buzz is added to your Google profile (and immediately picked up in Google search) will turn those seemingly vestigial Google profiles into something that might just become the next generation personal home page.

You can begin to see where all this is going: the integration of Gmail, Buzz, Reader, Voice, Geo, Blogger, YouTube, Calendar, Contacts... Buzz is a game-changing first step, but when you think about where Google will take this over the next year it gets exciting...
 
There's a real lesson here for anyone who wants to enter a crowded market: play to your strengths. Think through what job that hot new startup does for its users. Don't copy what they look like. Apply what they've taught you to your own business.

There are real benefits to using email as a social media platform. Just about everyone knows how to use it. (Despite claims that young millenials look down on email, it's just too useful to go away anytime soon.) It's incredibly flexible - you can share anything you want, and comment on it at any length, from 140 characters to as many as it takes to get your point across. It has a global address space that allows you to find almost anyone, an address space that links people to content. It's multi-platform, and accessible from anywhere.
 
In some ways, Gmail Buzz brings many of the benefits of Google Wave to Gmail. Every Buzz item can be turned into a conversation (much as in Wave or Friendfeed.) People can comment on your Buzz, comment on your comments, or @ reply you. Sure, it lacks the hyper-cool wiki-style shared editing features (though those perhaps could be added in a future release), but it also lacks the critical flaw that made Wave into more of a "concept car" than a real product: I don't have to adopt a new tool or build a new social network. It just adds rich new capabilities into the tool and network that I already use.
 
Google has also done a terrific job of giving inline preview to links you share. This is especially awesome for photos and videos. The inline slideshows are terrific - actually better than you get in most native photo or video sharing apps. And I love that you can share a Flickr link as easily as you can share one from Picasa (bucking the trend of vendors to try to lock you in to their own services.) Google says it's committed to Buzz being "the poster child for what it means to build an open, standards-compliant social product that serves the interests of users..." I'm looking forward to seeing more signs of this commitment as Buzz (and other Google products) evolve.
 
P.S. There's also a great, related Buzz announcement for Mobile, which shows off Google's platform thinking. On the mobile phone, Buzz is automatically "snapped" to your location, also using metrics like time of day to figure out the most relevant location (e.g. during the day you might be at Google, but if it's nighttime, it may be more likely that you're at the Shoreline Amphitheater across the street.) Buzz related to a location will show up on the relevant Google Placepage, and in a new geotagged Buzz layer on Google Maps. What we're seeing is the application of algorithmic relevance to buzz - and the power of what I've long been calling "the internet operating system."
 
First off, I think that it's great that Google is iterating Gmail, and actually improving a product versus rolling out yet another one-off.

It does, though, beg the question: Is Gmail the new Wave, as I thought that Wave was destined to be the new Gmail?

Similarly, wouldn't Reader be better nested inside this buzzable Gmail than in it's current wooden frame?

In other words, Google has this somewhat head-achey culture of creating overlapping products (Buzz, Wave, Reader, Talk, Gmail, Chrome, Android) then giving cloudy guidance on where they'll integrate, where they'll silo and where they'll make into a platform.
 
Similarly, as a consumer, partner, developer, wouldn't it be nice if they could just be clear where they are experimenting, where it's a product and where it ties into with a larger vision.

After all, between pivoting between labs, beta and NOT, they render these boundaries somewhat meaningless as demarcation lines, and generally risk teaching the market to only pay prolonged, serious attention when Google shows that THEY are paying prolonged serious attention to a given product, which doesn't seem like a winning strategy for successful market innovation, IMHO.

Food for thought.
 
How smoothly for people do email (which pertains mostly to real-world life) and other social media (which are much more casual, topically based, arbitrary and at times practically anonymous) actually integrate? For some people, maybe very smoothly.

But for me, they are different contacts silos with different use cases.

Buzz's integration with Gmail makes me pay attention (whereas I ignored the same features on MSN and Yahoo), but I'm still not sure that I'll find it useful or helpful or just a PITA.
 
I don't understand why it becomes such a big deal when Google adds a couple new features to its products.

Google integrated IM functionality in gmail a couple years back, did that stop users from logging into other IMs or even signing up for other IMs?

I don't think these features are going to kill facebook or twitter....

Twitter is a microchannel that we use to listen to others. They are not necessaily the people I have email exchange with. So, with Google buzz I am not going to stop logging into twitter....

As for facebook, it is a fun platform with gazillions of apps and features on it. So, I don't think buzz is going to kill facebook either.

If anything, social networking features in gmail are a natural and logical improvements and are useful. but i don;t think it will make much of an impact on facebook, twitter.
 
Why all the talk about it being a Facebook or Twitter "Killer"? I might be wrong here, but isn't this a statement made by the press / users? Not sure if that was the intention in the first place (buzz to compete against FB and Twitter).

I would like to see people discuss the different uses and the experience with the product as apposed to the continuous harping on about the competition side of things.

It is just another digital tool, use it, don't use it...
 
Great idea, should be useful.

For people who use it, it's another benefit of having a google account, with friends who use these services as well. If not, then it's just a feature you can ignore. No point in complaining about it folks. :P

And I think Google still wants to make Wave successful, but it's just not out of preview yet, and still has a lot of maturing to do. The important thing for Google right now I think is to stop producing new products for a while and put a solid effort on integrating all their existing ones into one solid platform.

If Google can work out a way of easily combining Gmail, Profiles, Youtube, Talk, Reader, Calendar, News, Wave, Docs, and now Buzz, their search engine ofcourse and everything else, all into one nice package, then they could very well have a killer platform for communication and collaboration.
 
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