I Don't Get the Buzz about Buzz – Do You?

“I now have a number that appears alongside Buzz every time I log into Gmail to indicate something… Mostly (I’m guessing 80%) they are just things that were sent as Tweets on Twitter and echoed in Buzz.”

Yeah… I concur… for me, Buzz generated some initial excitement… then just falls flat as annoying echos of tweets.

I agree on the fact that buzz itself is redundant with other services. However, when you link it with Reader and chat statuses (and naturally with twitter), it's useful for agregating things that you can comment with friends, just a click out of gmail.

Don't really get Buzz nor do I use it. I find it fascinating though that a modern service such as Twitter can establish itself so well that a competitor as resourceful and powerful as Google can't even scratch the market – even if they did launch it haphazardly.

i thought it was a waste of my time, and had it disabled for the longest time when it first released, but have since re-enabled. it seems to actually help w/getting some stuff indexed on google. oddly enough though, it seems to only index certain things? for now, i have it active, and check it out from time to time.

i thought it was a waste of my time, and had it disabled for the longest time when it first released, but have since re-enabled. it seems to actually help w/getting some stuff indexed on google. oddly enough though, it seems to only index certain things? for now, i have it active, and check it out from time to time.

completely agree.
dont forget about google wave – must have taken far more resources to develop. launched to much fanfare and a 10 minute video trying to explain an actual user-case.
flopped as quickly as it launched – never to be heard of again

Re: picture spacing – you have a clear: both on the image tag if you change it to clear:left – the image shoots back up into place

On your point about Google being a 'real' company by getting away with just launching and seeing what sticks – it just may be that the are the ONLY 'real' company that can. They've clearly been big for awhile and continue to do it without too much backlash from Wall Street and not enough from Main Street. It's an engineering culture with very loose reins. Meaning it isn't duplicatable by 'real' business types. My guess is that internally they think it is curious that people don't 'get' things like Buzz. They probably tell each other “we are ahead of the curve, 'they' haven't caught up to us yet”. They are definitely becoming a lot like Microsoft – letting others create new technology (phones, update platforms, TV delivery) and then trying to better the tech their own way as a follower. Plenty of case studies to go before we see them ignore a technology they think they can better (even if they don't actually end up being better).

Good summary of Google in general Mark – very talented operators, incredibly successful core business, a couple of other hits to their credit, but really far too many diversions and “also ran” products. They are the modern day Microsoft by my way of thinking. Windows and Office, hugely profitable core business. Exchange, SQL Server and Development Tools are things they are good at as well, nice hits. Then there is a menagerie of wasteful attempts.

I think Google is actually a much riskier proposition than Microsoft because as has been proven in the past, the moment a better search technology comes along, people WILL switch. If you kill search, then Google's lucrative ad platform diminishes and you're left with a bunch of half finished experimental products predicated on ad revenue which might not be there.

I have a core social network on buzz that does not use twitter. The conversation threading and ability to post only to people you follow is used pretty extensively in that group. People often post much longer messages than tweets. For me it is an alternative to facebook where i find the stuff I want to read gets lost in the jumble of everything else.

However, I think my use case is a bit unusual, since the “core social network” i refer to consists largely of CMU phd students and alum, and google employees!

exactly my experience. i initially liked it – now dont even look at it

Mark:

While I too am a category 1 & 2 guy, I don't share your conclusions as to whether this reflects poorly on Google. I'd be much more fearful of a risk-averse middle management arising that quashes 'unproven' ideas than shipping beta services that fail to hit the sweet spot of user experience/utility. So while I too don't get the Wave, can I imagine a future where a killer app includes elements of the Wave technology? Absolutely. Further, “sticking to your knitting” may not be the best talent-retention policy as uber-geeks need new, interesting problems to think about with the assumption that the well-formed ones will ship, whether there is a “market” for it or not.

Fear of failure is so rampant in all walks of life, I'm glad there's a large, high-profile corporation that is willing to endure the slings and arrows understanding that one big hit more than makes up for dozens of small failures.

I'll tell you about how I use Buzz and why I find it to be useful. I know this may not be everyone else.

I use Facebook and Twitter and think those products serve good but different purposes than Buzz. Facebook is about your extended network. Everyone has hundreds of friends on Facebook and connects with people they have met through all walks of life. Your mom, your best man, and the guy that played catcher on your 3rd grade baseball team are all your Facebook friends. Great; it's the first place I look when trying to reconnect with someone I haven't spoken to in a while or don't have contact info for.

Twitter, by the nature of the ecosystem, is open. I follow many people that I have had a few interactions with in business and some people that I have never met. The average opinion about Twitter is that it's not creepy to associate yourself with someone you have never met. The opposite tends to be true on Facebook and LinkedIn; I want to know the person that wants to be publicly associated with me. Like you said Mark, the power of Twitter is in link sharing and I completely agree. I know Twitter can be private, and Facebook has a million different privacy controls but those don't matter. It's simply how the networks are used by most people.

About Buzz: it's for the people I talk to every day. They are in my core group and I'm likely to have dinner with or see at least one of them before I go to sleep tonight. The guy from 3rd grade baseball team isn't on there because we don't talk that much. Why can't this just be done on Facebook? It can, but I want to say things to just 10 people (the closest people) that I don't want everyone to know. Away messages are just like a Facebook status or a Tweet, but not everyone sees them. I can easily comment or engage a friend through Gchat about his or her away message. That's it. No following Governators or trying shop for and “like” a new mattress brand. No games. No Farmville notifications. It's simple content, and really the content I care about the most.

There are 15 people in my Gchat dialog and 5 are online right now. Most of them don't use Twitter and all of them use Facebook but, again, that doesn't matter. I keep Buzz tightly closed and I like it closed. It's simple and should stay simple. Anything more than this and it will get cluttered and become unusable.

Oh, and you ask if I trust Google over Facebook? Yep.

Mark, I agree with your overall assessment of Google Buzz. For me it's just one more social net I have to keep up with. The only reason I give it attention is to make sure I am setup correctly and help my Google rankings. Perhaps if Buzz was available on the Google Apps platform it would get more traction for business users. In my opinion once large companies become successful like Google they lose their entrepreneurial skills and get burdened with the corporate structure and become slow. Just look at Microsoft. Same thing happened to them. It will eventually happen to Google in time. What they should do is first and foremost focus on making what they currently have better instead of getting sidetracked on tangents.

I view Buzz as a platform play, just like Twitter. When Twitter first started out, it didn't have any traction at all for about 3 years until it took off. I believe this is because platform products typically have a broad spectrum of usage scenarios and don't do enough to drive users to a particular use case. This is a problem in gaining traction because they rely on users to come up with use cases; users are just too uncreative or too busy to be creative to think up use cases by themselves – it's much faster to come up with one and scream to users that this is the best way to do that.

Thus platform plays need a long runway. If the creators refuse to generate use cases for users when they come (ie. better than “what are you doing today?”), then they have to wait a long time for the user base to come up with use cases for themselves. With Twitter, they got lucky. Some celebs jumped on and dragged a whole bunch of “normals” (to quote chris dixon) on to the platform.

Will Buzz get lucky too? Who knows. I think the world is littered with dead platforms with immense vision who couldn't last long enough to grow big to becoming sustainable businesses.

But copying someone else out there isn't enough (ie. Buzz copies Twitter) to drag people onto the platform. Now that there is a 800 lb gorilla out there, they have to communicate why it's better than what people have now. There is no obvious benefit for being on Buzz. We have Twitter and it's great for what we use it for!

BTW we've invested our time/effort into Twitter already. Our Twitter social graph is over there; it's a special public graph that is not like Facebook but has different value. Rebuilding that on Buzz is not worth it. It's why we won't just go jump on another social networking site. All our tweets are there, so we have a lot of past content we've posted. We have no history on Buzz. So switching costs are very very high.

The advantage Buzz has is that it has time to wait. Google will keep funding it until upper management gets frustrated or impatient and kill it. Or it will take off. Who knows. Perhaps some large group of users will find a unique, better use case for Buzz that can't be done on Twitter. I think it unlikely if Buzz reflects pretty much the same features as Twitter…

Mark, you wrote: “I think when they put their mind to things they are the most talented technology company on the planet. Or at least in the top 3″

Ok, now I am curious. What are your top 3 technology companies?

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Buzz is crowded out by functionality within Gmail itself. If I want to send a brief message, I'll use Google Talk. If I want to send a longer message, I'll send an email.
Compound that with all the other places where we can exchange status updates and messages – facebook, twitter, Skype, Wave (anyone there?).
I think that's enough of a choice without Buzz stepping in. They stepped in too late after Twitter got traction, and unfortunately for Google, the hype turned negative with privacy concerns because it was automatically activated.
These aren't reasons enough for a service like Buzz to flounder, and as someone else here commented, it really is surprising that Google didn't succeed with Buzz.

In fact, maybe you should have a follow-up twitter survey about another Google damp squib: “Wave: waving or drowning?”

“At some point when you’re a “real” company I wonder whether you can really get away with just launching Beta versions of everything and seeing what sticks. Might work for Silicon Valley startups. Not sure it is as effective for big, branded companies that are supposed to stand for quality.”

- wow, that seems provocative – I would have thought that the concepts of lean startup, customer development, rapid prototyping etc were exactly what “real companies” needed to embrace. As startups evolve into “real companies” they codify their processes, their mindsets and lose the ability to do all these great things that lead to the efficient pursuit of great new services & products.

I've tried several times to get into using buzz, but I just don't really see the point. Use case #3 is really the only time i've found it useful at all, but thats not really what the heart of this article is about.

Google has had this, “see what sticks” model for awhile now. If you go and look at their 'other products' page you can see the dozens upon dozens of little pet projects they have thrown out there. Part of it is there attempt to hold on to their startup mentality and appeal, and a part of it is just an attempt to find another market. They are in business to make money and if they can enter a new market they will.

I believe buzz suffered more than other google projects mainly because of bad timing and the gmail integration. The whole issue with gmail made it look like such a mess and if they had simply made it an opt-in services found on another page it wouldn't have been as big of a deal that it was oddly set up.

When I start to think about it I realize that one of the biggest issues with it is in the influx from twitter, it creates a torrent of noise that just seems to clutter the buzz stream preventing me from finding anything I might have been looking for. Some part of me thinks google just wants twitter's data, but that doesnt' make sense google has already paid a lot for direct access to the fire hose of data. Perhaps google believes if everyone on gmail is volunteering to send their tweets to buzz, they will have enough data from twitter without having to pay for it. Entirely speculation though.

One final thought on buzz (good lord this comment is too long),
After reading several articles about the company culture of google. They live and breathe google products more than any google-phile may in their day to day life. They, obviously, know the inside and intimate workings of gmail/search/maps/etc. So I am sure when they integrated buzz with gmail internally everyone loved it. They could see all those who they emailed the most (google uses email over chat clients even in the same office), and would be able to stay productive quickly. So they probably just assumed the rest of the world would love it as well, but we dont all run like google does.

Great article Mark, very thought provoking, or perhaps i'm just longwinded.

The Buzz is that Google stuck it right in everyone's inbox causing a stir. Buzz is dead and perhaps an attempt to scare twitter into selling for sub $3Billion. They probably made a run at Twitter, didn't want to overpay up to $5B, and released Buzz in response. You're gonna have to edit the html of the wordpress post to fix the image, it could need an align left / align top or removal of some

tags but it's not exactly my expertise, I'd have to get into the WP and tinker around a few min and figure it out. I'm sure someone else will be able to give you exact instructions.

Good point Liad. So far Google's attempts at social have flopped big time. I don't think this spells doom for the company at all. They've done an awesome job launching a real iPhone/iPad competitor in Android, something that falls pretty far outside of their core search business. But on the social front I think Google is done.

Perhaps a more interesting question is whether any of the major social networks will be able to drink some of Google's milkshake. Twitter has already started with its realtime search abilities and my guess is that Facebook will follow with a powerful social search engine. When I search “yoga studio in NYC” I would rather know studios that my friends “like” than an amalgamation of random studios displayed on a Google map.

Here's a great comment by a friend of mine, tweeted at the time of Buzz's launch: Google hires a battalion of CompSci PhDs that have never lived out of school and people wonder why they struggle with social software.

I had forgotten about buzz. It reminded me that http://ping.fm a service I use to post to all my social networks has added support for buzz, so I just went through and removed all the networks buzz was aggregating from and then set up ping.fm to post to it too. But I don't really use it for anything because no one else is using it.

It all started when investors let Microsoft keep $50B in cash on the balance sheet without ever paying a dividend, and then they plunked over $30B in losses on the Xbox platform before ever seeing a profit, and countless more on Windows mobile. Google seems a little bit better at allocating capital than Microsoft – after all Buzz probably cost them only $10-$20M to launch, and they have some good code they can maybe repurpose. I'd be more concern with heavy capital intensive pet projects like broadband in the sticks. and the cafeteria.

On the flip side, it is really hard for big companies to innovate, so you can't kill them when they fail. Any more than you can kill a VC for having some stinkers in its portfolio.

My thoughts exactly. And I think a great example is that other “Seattle company.” I think it's the fact that they have been a “real” company that has lead to ten years of value destruction (at least in terms of stock price).

In fact, I would argue that Google has done a great job of rapid prototyping but at the same time not sacrificing quality. Google didn't release something like Windows Vista or Internet Explorer – their entirely unprofitable browser is one of the best out there and is constantly getting better.

And while Buzz may not have been a successful or even good product, it's not really broken. It's just something no one wants. I wouldn't fault Google for lacking quality; when it comes to Buzz, I'd only fault them for lack of insight into micro-blogging.