Thursday, February 11, 2010

thoughts about buzz

so google buzz is here and to use common phrase, disruptive.

my thoughts, all in lower case

facebook has replaced most social email, often via facebook messages,
less often by wall post and comments. it's fun, random but rather noisy.

twitter is the high speed, realtime, random world of both your interests
friends, profession, interestes and your idols.

i'd hazzard a guess and say that email these days is mostly used for work,
only made really useful imho for by gmail.

work takes up a big chunk of people lifes, you may spend a lot of time in
the office, at lunch and after work drinks with work mates. often
in the professional world, you get to meet a lot of interesting people,
usually with common interests thru the work you do

the only instant messager i think should be used for work, is google-talk,
because you can save the conversations for later use.

so, then came buzz

i first saw it one my google nexus one, which i love btw, then it appeared
this morning in my gmail. interesting, lot's of "first posts" etc to start
with

i noticed myself enjoying the ability to comment on tweets and status updates,
which i rather liked, also sharing in google reader, which is then buzzed
straight away. it completely left the facebook share bookmark feeling
clunky and so like last decade :)

my audience so far is a more relevant social graph for discussion than
facebook, not because those people aren't also on facebook but i already
or do (occasionally) email them, or more often google talk with them

buzz ain't bad for a first release, google has now completely surpassed
microsoft as the dominant company in it.

between gmail, jira, twitter, facebook and google reader, gmail still has
the nicest interface, perhaps almost the oldest too.

now why can't i save my sms from my nexus one as conversations in gmail huh?

google contacts is perhaps one of the least praised aspects of google's
android extensions. i now have just one email and phone number database,
which i can edit with real tools like a keyboard and mouse, happy!

fingers crossed and lets hope google stays true to their motto

postscript!

my first reaction to buzz was, how good is this for business purposes?

facebook, twitter, sharepoint & notes have just been completely aced
by what buzz brings to google business offering, can they catch up?