I must admit it, I was not negative towards Google Buzz from the start.
I already use Google Reader extensively and use the sharing feature liberally both to keep interesting articles marked and to start discussions on them. The idea of interspersing it with short journal-like updates (yet longer than what Facebook and Twitter allow – one of the reasons I never took to the sites) and other features made me rejoice and adopt it immediately.
Soon, my initial entusiasm was damped, though. To start buzzing, I have to create a public profile where my buzzes are echoed – a profile which makes people able to guess my e-mail address, as well. Now, I wish to share things with my social network, but I have a rather strong desire to not make it public as well for my own personal reasons. So I tried to shut off the public profile. Which – you guessed it – shut off my access to using Buzz.
Some options were public by default, some at least had the decency to ask. And while coupling it with my personal GMail account is a good idea on principle, I would like the option to have public and private Buzz feeds as well, lists for which content reaches which people on my list, and non-public lists.
A fellow blogger put it best when he says: “Knowing someone and being their friend are often two different things.”
While I do not agree with the conclusions of this blogger (I do think that Google Buzz has potential, it’s just not ready yet and was rolled out very prematurely), I do think that while the idea was good, the status of the project was still very early alpha, if at all.
Now Google have even admitted themselves that they have not thought to test before the release.
One can, for now, just hope that they will recover from it and the technology will be allowed to prove itself against the already existing solutions.
The Coconut League 