I've spent about 45 minutes messing around with Google Buzz. I'm on just about every social media service that is available. I use a ton of apps for both PC and Mac. I also have used a ton of apps on the Blackberry and iPhone. Long story short, I know way too much about social web services and technology.
So, when Google Buzz opened the door to me, I jumped right in. Here are my initial thoughts:
- It's comforting that those I'm really connected to will feed content into a site I live in all day -- Gmail.
- I don't like the continuous scrolling of content. It feels very crowded.
- I'm going to be annoyed by the zillion updates in my inbox, though I know now that you can archive them automatically, skipping the inbox all together.
- It feels like Twitter when I first joined in 2007, almost like a fish out of water.
- It's definitely a tool that will compete with Twitter as folks look to drill down into their personal networks and really connect with those more important to them vs. 25,000 followers on Twitter.
- It's no Facebook killer. Yet.
- I love the integration of photos and videos.
- When will it be connected to Google Wave and will it push Google Wave towards a higher adoption rate?
- It's not private so whatever you write, everyone will see for the most part.
Overall, it's a nice new toy to play with. It'll be interesting to see whether or not users adopt it and tweak its use in a way that it wasn't designed for.