Google has never been much of a heavyweight in the social networking market. Orkut is still endemic to India and Brazil and can hardly be considered competition to Twitter and Facebook. Jaiku, a micro-blogging service almost exactly like Twitter, has been abandoned by Google. Their latest attempt to dethrone Twitter and Facebook is through Buzz, which turns Gmail into a social networking site.
My initial impression about Buzz was positive, but having looked at it for the past week, I have had to change my opinion. Here’s a list of reasons why I don”t like Buzz and would much rather prefer to continue using Twitter.
Comments on a Buzz
This is the one feature that really puts me off. Not that I am against users being able to react to their friend’s Buzz, but every time someone posts a comment on a buzz, it appears on my page even if the commenter isn’t someone I follow. Twitter handles this much more elegantly by showing only the replies by people who I am following. How could the Buzz team have missed something so obvious?
Can’t tweet through Buzz
I might have considered Buzz as an option if it automatically posted my buzzes to Twitter. But this hasn’t happened, and only tweets from Twitter are imported into Buzz and even that seems buggy. I saw a tweet posted weeks ago by a friend imported into Buzz.
No Facebook integration
To be honest, I wouldn’t really use this feature, but a lot of other people would and giving us a choice would have been a nice thing to do rather than ignore Facebook completely.
Not everybody deserves a microblogging audience
I’m sorry I sound so arrogant here but that’s my honest opinion. With Buzz, Google has made microblogging easily accessible to people who otherwise wouldn’t bother with microblogging and therefore never joined twitter. Now all those hundreds of people have a microblogging service within their mailbox and we’re flooded with absolutely boring, pointless and quite often incomprehensible statuses. There are plenty of people like that in Twitter, but at least Twitter — unlike Buzz — didn’t assume that I would want to follow them.
Assumptions
As someone who develops web applications, I know that assumptions are a good thing. Sometimes you have to make choices for your users so their work is reduced. But you must also know where to draw the line. As a user I don’t at all appreciate that Google decided who I should follow and who should follow me and what I should share with my followers. I believe Google has changed this since then, but it did damage the first impression.
Too many features
One thing I felt about Buzz was that it was trying to beat Twitter by giving users more features. There’s comment, like, email and reply by chat features, along with others such as report abuse and link to post hidden nearby. Twitter neatly handles all these using two simple options – reply and retweet.
Buzz is going to be one Google product that will be hard to sell to me. Apart from the absence of spam bots, there isn’t much I like about it and I’m convinced that I’m better off using Twitter. This post is mostly a Twitter user’s perspective of Buzz, but I suppose it doesn’t have much to offer to the Facebook crowd as well. I’m not actually going to disable Buzz yet, and am watching how it’s going to be improved. But for the time being, my Buzz followers will only see little activity on my account apart from my tweets automatically fetched into Buzz.
What is your take on Buzz? What social networking sites do you use and how does Buzz compare to those?