Like everyone, yesterday I got access to Google Buzz. And like most people, I’m scratching my head as to the whys and hows of it.
Personally, I really like the fact that it has mashed together bits of Google Wave (has anyone found a use for it yet?), Google Talk, and the comments feature of Google Reader. I like having a better way of viewing the comments on shared Google Reader articles, and as a lot of my contacts are fellow Gmail, I like having a group conversation space.
However, there’s are so many bad decisions to the product. The automatic opt in and auto follow feature is fraught. I ended up with a number of people following me who I had no idea who they were! It turns out they were people that I had contacted once in the process of making a purchase or contacting a help desk. Not people I wanted to keep in touch with! And the block option is not immediately obvious – you are required to actually view the persons profile and it’s in small, faint font there.
There there are the privacy issues which have been widely reported already. I certainly turned off the display followers option quicksmart.
The location features are interesting. I started using yesterday on my iPhone, and it automatically adds your current location (it wasn’t quite accurate for me, giving a street a few streets away). This is good for hyper local searches but it does open your buzz posts to the general public as one of my friends discovered this morning!
The forwarding of buzz comments to my inbox is slightly irritating. Why forward them there when the Buzz inbox is right below? It doesn’t make much sense. However this is at least fixed by setting up a filter to remove them straightaway.
Overall though, I don’t know that it will be something I continue to use. I already have twitter where I have group conversations (with the same people as on buzz), I already have the comments feature on Google Reader. I don’t really see a purpose for it as yet.
I will however keep using for a little while and see if I can find a place for it to fit.
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