We have all been talking about our issues with Google Buzz. In theory, having your conversations aggregated in your email should be a huge convenience. But from the moment Buzz appeared in our inboxes, it was greeted as either a savior or a marauder. And a week later, even the people who had thought "savior," had gone to the dark side. In fact Dave Winer turned it off after only a few hours. Robert Scoble, however, keeps trying to use it, as does Thomas Hawk. Thomas, who is a brilliant digital photographer, thinks it's a great place to display photos, and for him, it seems to be. He puts some photos up, they are awesome, and one or two people say so.
Scoble, however, is less fortunate in his use of Buzz. He is the original firehose. This weekend he started a Buzz asking his readers which of the location-based services they preferred. I suspect that was his swan song with the tool, because I could see he was determined to answer almost every commenter. About 60 comments in, I registered my own opinion. The next day, I returned to Buzz to see if he had responded to me.
In all fairness to him, he doesn't answer everything I write to him, even though we're friends. Sometimes when I comment on his blog, it's just my way of saying "hi, buddy, long time no see." But when I went back to the original Buzz, there were over two hundred comments, and I couldn't even find where I had weighed in. Yes, some of the comments had been collapsed, but still…I never found my original comment.
Conclusions:
Buzz is not good for conversations. Unlike Friendfeed, when it was used by people like Steve Gillmor and Leo laPorte for chatrooms during their shows, it doesn't perform well in real time, and if you have a long conversation with many people in it, the conversation becomes more effort to follow than it's worth.
There's too much spam, or too many voices weighing in just to hear themselves.
Rooms won't help that much, because unless the rooms are semi-private, we will be having conversations with the wrong people sometimes.
I only want to have conversations (attention gestures) with two kinds of people: those I already know and respect (social graph), and those I want to know and respect (discovery). The rest, please, should be silence, not Buzz.
Now, somebody solve that problem for me in the real time stream.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
So what IS buzz good for?
Seems to be a broadcasting tool to your email contacts.
So it's like constant contact, only real time? Hmmm…