I resisted the urge to write about Google Buzz until I had spent some time using it. Now that I have, I'm underwhelmed. And this is from someone who likes Google, has an Android phone, and was really hoping for a game-changer.
My first issue is that the people I am in contact with over Gmail typically are not the people I follow, or who follow me, on Twitter. Most of the people I interact with on Twitter are people I've met on Twitter and as such, I don't exchange e-mail addresses with them. There's no need, I can just send them a DM. Also, while many of my Gmail contacts are not on Twitter, most of them are on Facebook, but they are so entrenched into Facebook, there's no way they're leaving. Of course, that's just me and my contacts, others may be different.
Also, and this has been brought up by a number of people, the "Buzz" (is that what we're calling it?) that has the most replies and is the most active, automatically rises to the top of your feed in Gmail. This means if you follow Mashable, like I did for all of one day, all you see is posts from Mashable with extremely long comment sections. Personally, I am not going to read 400+ comments and I am also not going to keep scrolling past those comments to get to something I really want to read. Rather than just "giving me the good stuff" this is just adding more clutter to my inbox.
The mobile applications of Buzz are very interesting, and instead of it being a "Twitter killer" like advertised, I see it possibly being more of a competition to Yelp and Foursquare. However, for some reason Google decided to make Buzz only compatible with Android 2.0, not 1.5 phones. This means if you were to go buy an HTC Eris today, you would not be able to use Buzz on that phone. This is mind boggling to me as Google went out of their way to make sure Buzz was compatible with all iPhones, you'd think they'd make sure it would work on all phones using their OS! This is a slap in the face to early adopters who switched to Android phones and are waiting to get upgrades to Android 2.0 pushed through.
That all being said, I am still going to give it more time to see if I "get it" and start liking Buzz. After all, when I first started using Twitter, I hated it. Now I use it daily. This also may be a first step toward something much bigger, similar to the iPad. But from what I've seen so far, I'm not holding my breath.
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