Google this week announced the release of Buzz, a social media service that aggregates your Twitter updates, shared Google Reader items, Picasa, Flickr, Google Chat statuses and Buzz messages into a chronological panel. Too bad it’s for the ignorant and lazy.
You see, the problem with Buzz is that it gallivants around sucking up all these updates you’ve made to other social media sites, but fails to return the favor. Buzz merely uses your time on other networks as a catalyst for immediate discussion, and interaction with other Buzz users. In other words, Google hopes to attract the users that are too lazy to spend the time cultivating a new social network.
Google also knows that people loathe signing up to new websites, even the ones with ten-second registrations. This is doubly true for sites that duplicate the functionality of ones they already frequent. Once you realize that Buzz is little more than Twitter with bigger messages, you can see why it was married to Gmail: Everyone and their cat already has an account!
In fact, Google has already tried the independent Twitter clone before. The service is called Jaiku, and unless you’re one of those weirdos that collects social media icons like keyboard crumbs, you’ve probably never heard of it. It’s a practical failure. Buzz, on the other hand, never has to contend with the travails of building a new user base or convincing users that it’s worth signing up for in addition to Twitter. It’s just there. Ready and waiting.
If memory serves, it’s also the first Google App the company has ever launched inside of another one of its applications. Sure, Maps got Navigation and Street View, but those serve as logical extensions of the basic service. Buzz, on the other hand, doesn’t logically extend Gmail. It’s an application that just happens to call the Gmail menu home and, great Jaiku’s ghost, it does so because Google knows that it would fail if they didn’t make it easier than drooling on your pillow.
Speaking of drooling, how about the multitudes that are infantilized by the very sight of a computer? These are the special people for which the iPad was designed, and the many at which the pathetic “email pictures and movies to your friends!” ISP advertisements are targeted. The one thing this terrified legion understands is email. By pairing Buzz with Gmail, Google actually has a tiny chance in hell of recruiting the ignorant lot that would never in a million years dare to understand Twitter.
Finally, as for a copycat service that attempts to surmount its creator’s past failures by forcefully and obtrusively inserting itself into my workflow with a design that ultimately forces me to choose between monitoring yet another service or abandoning the rest… Well, Google can fuck right off.
Whether or not Buzz follows Wave into obscurity is anyone’s guess, but I have a feeling that it will quickly become little more than a hangout for “social media gurus,” Google dogmatists or spammers. As for me, the only Buzz I want precludes the use of heavy equipment or motor vehicles.
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