thoughts on Buzz

• It’s interesting to watch how people are using the service, and to try to deduce the norms that will soon emerge arround it.  I just de-linked my Flickr account because I realized I didn’t mean to push a recently-uploaded photo on my followers.  I still have Twitter linked to it — though given the FB status/Twitter faux pas, I suspect I’ll remove that connection soon, too.
• The automatic importation of contacts strikes me as a big mistake.  Not only because it’s a privacy problem, but because it short-circuits the normal lifecycle of social networks. It’s a profoundly elitist opinion, but I do think that it’s important to have an initial phase during which early-adopting users fill a new service with high-value content — amusing, uncensored, nonprofessional/noncommercial communication — creating a attractive networking target for the rest of the population, which then filters in.Instead, Google has  opted to drop its users into the midpoint of its new network’s lifecycle.  I’m not sure this is a bad idea, exactly — I’d love to have a network with the immediacy of Twitter, but (slightly) looser space and media limitations (I’ll be curious to see whether Google has built the infrastructure behind Buzz to make more Twitter-like use cases possible). In theory, Buzz can satisfy that desire: it’s basically FriendFeed, but with a very high adoption rate among my contacts thanks to Google’s marketing advantage.  But because it skipped the (ahem) buzz-building phase, Buzz will never garner the excitement and accompanying celebrity and media evangelism that Twitter has.
• Similarly, I doubt I’ll adopt an evangelical stance toward the service among my peers — I don’t do that very often, don’t have much of a talent for it, and don’t want to spend personal capital pushing a new social network (which, these days, is always a low-percentage play).  But I’ll keep watching, and I’ll keep using Buzz if other people do.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.