My Gmail account was just setup with Google’s new social networking tool, Google Buzz and after a few minutes of playing with it, I honestly wish this is what Twitter was like. Now, do I think that there needs to be yet another Twitter clone out there, no, but I would love to see Twitter implement some of the things that Google Buzz is doing. The way Buzz handles links, images and videos are much better than Twitter considering Twitter itself doesn’t handle any of that it relies on sites like Twitpic to create links to pictures that are stored on another site. Buzz embeds them right into the, umm, I have no clue what to call each update, there doesn’t seem to be a cool “buzz” word to use for them like Twitter has Tweets.
Anyways, links you post automatically grab a summary of the link, videos embed for viewing inline and pictures can show up in a nice little slideshow if you want. Much better implementation than Twitter, but it really just seems like a dumbed down version of Google Wave. I get that when Wave was announced it was thought to be this amazing thing that would change the way we communicate online, but it’s a little complicated and while it does do things pretty well, you need to have a use for it… and people to use it with, so it kind of fizzled out. I still use it during the day to talk to a few people and we’re currently using it to plan a trip for this summer, but it’s hard because not everyone going on the trip has it and/or knows how to use it. So it looks like Google took some of those cool aspects of Wave and implemented them into a Twitter clone that is built into GMail and thus available and has the possibility to be used by a lot more people.
The fact that it incorporates right into GMail is a huge plus since people don’t have to go all over the place to update it or use it. And it can also pull your tweets into it so you don’t have to update 2 places. So for now I don’t know that I’ll use it too much, but we’ll see. I think the overall user experience is a step up from Twitter, but with Twitter having such a huge head start and a rapidly growing user base it’ll be hard for Google to get people to switch over, but we’ll see.
What are your thoughts on Buzz so far? Will you leave Twitter and start using this or will you stick with Twitter and maybe have it update your Buzz feed?
