I’m Underwhelmed by Google Buzz

Google released their new “social network,” Buzz, to much fanfare this week.

People watched the live broadcast and tweeted about it excitedly. The unfortunate few who hadn’t received their Buzz account were asking, “what is it? What is it?” The Silicon Alley Insider giggled that Buzz was going to be a Twitter killer. Jason McCabe Calcanis breathlessly declared that Facebook’s traffic would drop by half because of the buzz.

The best I can give it is a “meh.”

I’m sorry, I really am. I like Google. I like their products. I use Blogspot for my personal blog. I use Gmail for my email interface, including Pro Blog Service emails. We use Google Docs for work flow and client document sharing. So I really wanted this to work.

But I haven’t been impressed by Google Buzz. It has become one more thing in my Inbox to nag at me. At least with Facebook and Twitter, I can ignore the feed for a while, and I don’t have to worry about whether I missed anything.

Buzz, on the other hand, has a spot in my Google inbox, where I get to see how many different posts, articles, and statement about “I’m just trying to figure out Buzz,” along with every “me too. What does it do?” comment. The count just sits there, staring at me plaintively, until I clear out the Buzz inbox. And since there’s no “Mark all as read” button, I have to scroll down just to “read” them to get rid of them.

(Note: I’ve found that if I hit CMD-Down and go to the end of the page and then CMD-Up, it clears everything out.)

I’ve got accounts on FriendFeed, Plaxo, and other life streaming social networks, and I haven’t looked at any of them in months. I haven’t touched FriendFeed since the week I opened the account. Why? Because I don’t need to have all of the Twitter and Facebook information of all my friends aggregated into one place. If I want to see what someone is doing on Twitter and Facebook, I just go to those networks. I don’t need to go to a 3rd place to do it.

That’s what Google Buzz is, a life streamer. It aggregates every short question, Buzz post, tweet, status update, LinkedIn comment, Flickr and Picasa photo, and YouTube video any of my contacts have posted.

In short, Buzz isn’t going to kill Twitter or Facebook. It’s going to kill my productivity if I keep using it. And so rather than try to keep up with the firehose that it has become (and I’ve only got 70 people in my stream), I’m going to ignore it until someone shows me what I can do with Buzz that I can’t do with Tweetdeck and its ability to create lists and columns.

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