Thoughts on Google Buzz

Google wants to put some buzz in your inbox. Google announced through a press conference and The Official Google Blog a new social feature in GMail that will be rolled out over the next few days. The new feature is called Google Buzz and it is an alternative to email and a status-like way to communicate with people. The name is not original as the Yahoo! Buzz social bookmarking service has been active since February 2008. In terms of features, Google Buzz borrows a lot from Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare. What I found interesting is that it also borrows from and overlaps features with Google Wave. Google Buzz provides a new way to share images, videos, status updates, and more with the people you already email and chat with. Google Buzz is integrated with your Gmail inbox, unlike Google Wave which is a separate service. Google Buzz will automatically follow your contacts, no need to find and import contacts all over again.

In terms of features, Google Buzz does not provide anything new or innovative. Like Gmail with it's threaded conversation, Google Buzz is a evolutionary step in online communications. Google Buzz is just your inbox with a Twitter-like status feed and the ability to import content from Twitter, Flickr, Google Picasa, and a host of other services. Many Facebook and Twitter users will find Google Buzz familiar.

As they roll out Google Buzz to all of GMail's user base, expect some sluggishness. I thought it so slow that I thought Google Buzz incorporated Twitter's infamous Fail Whale. You can tell that that this service is being rolled out slowly as you start seeing more and more of your contacts auto-following you.

Google Buzz and how it auto-follows your contacts is the new paradigm shift for GMail users. Twitter heavily relies on following people, and in fact the number of followers a Twitter account has is one way to measure popularity. Twitter openly lists the people you follow and those that follow you. That has been one of the features that has worked for Twitter and that has been imitated by Facebook and now Google Buzz.

But people have a more closely guarded and intimate outlook when it comes to their email, correspondence with friends, and their mailing contact lists. I dislike that fact that people I emailed once or twice for some one time business transaction are now following me. By no means, do I want to blast a tweet or buzz to these people. So I am spending my time blocking those folks I don't want to follow kill buzz. With Twitter, we have a different expectation. If we could describe social sites as environments that we live in, GMail is like own well guarded home and Twitter is like the stoop outside your home in a very busy neighborhood.

We all have different groups of people we follow on different social websites with different expectations of privacy. Personally, on Facebook I only connect with friends and family, and other FarmVille addicts. On Twitter I connect mostly with technologist, entrepreneurs, and software developers. But email, email is different. In my inbox, there are emails from close friends and family and the occasionally work or business related emails. And the paradigm of email was been that each email and email thread are private and specific to the recipients in the To address field. Google Buzz throws this paradigm out the window completely and like a parasite builds itself a social graph spider web around your personal contacts. I find it disturbing that Google Buzz opens up so much of what was once considered intimate. People spend a lot of time and effort networking and curating their contact lists but Google Buzz by default auto-follows and reveals those you follow and are following you. I think that the default setting of Google Buzz, particular how it auto-follows contacts you emailed once or twice, is just as bad of an idea as the recent Facebook change of Terms of Service and it's recent decision to make all your posts public.