Google Buzz: More Social Nonsense

In another step toward becoming socially acceptable, Google today unveiled "Google Buzz" -- a method for social sharing from inside Gmail. Naturally, some ever-creative types are already dubbing this release as a "Twitter-killer" and a "Facebook-killer." Because, we just can't get enough of that kind of language.

(By the way, what Web service would you kill if you could? Take our poll!)

In any case, we won't do that here... not because we think Twitter and Facebook are great or anything. It's just that we've been down this road with Google before. Remember when it was going to kill Wikipedia? Second Life? Skype? Ah, those were delusional days.

Still, the comparisons to Facebook and Twitter are not surprising. Essentially, Buzz is a combination of those services. As in Twitter, Buzz sets you up to "auto-follow" the updates of people you email and chat with the most in Gmail. As on Facebook, Gmail users can post status updates to a small group of friends or publicly to the Internet. Users can also choose to "like" or "unlike" posts from others. Buzz allows users to connect with Picasa, Google Reader, Flickr, and Twitter. But, unsurprisingly, users cannot post out to Twitter -- they can only pull updates in.

See more info on Buzz in this musical video from Google below:

We've known for a while that Google was planning to roll out social features for Gmail. Back in the Late Great June of 2008, Rishi Chandra, product manager of Google Enterprise, told Internet Evolution that Google planned to make its apps more social:

One of the great things social networking has done is create a passive way to consume content. You don't have to be there all the time, but you get a feed of updates, like an activity stream of some sort. Maybe you can apply that to your email box -- so that a portion of them are just passive updates and the rest are emails you need to read.

Allow me to dismiss this all with a great big Yawwwwwn. Here are three reasons I'm not excited:

1) Google is not great at social stuff. So there seems little reason to expect that Gmail is going to become the go-to location for updates from friends. In fact, whenever Google makes an attempt to mimic the successes of other startups, it usually fails (see paragraph three).

Moreover, despite Google's claim that "Our belief is that organizing the social information on the Web -- finding relevance in the noise -- has become a large-scale challenge, one that Google's experience in organizing information can help solve," the company has actually proven through its recent foray into real-time search to be quite bad at producing more relevant content for users.

2) More clutter for Gmail probably means more of those frequent outages and "this feature isn't working right now" messages we Gmail users have become accustomed to. And, rest assured, there will be clutter: All responses to users' Buzz posts are sent to users' inboxes. Also, Buzz promises to recommend content to you from people you aren't even following. Uh... thanks?

3) Google is not actually killing anything, which means all we're getting is yet another hub for useless chatter, yet another place to manage content. Perhaps a centralized destination for email and social networking updates would be a nice thing to have. But considering Gmail has 176 million unique visitors, compared with Facebook's 400 million (according to comScore) -- and considering reasons one and two -- it seems less likely that this is where we're headed, and more likely that Buzz will just become another useless clone of every other social service out there.

— Nicole Ferraro, Site Editor, Internet Evolution