Google announced their Buzz platform in February to much interest and fanfare. The idea is to allow users to post short snippets of what they are doing etc. Twitter style. The “Buzz” is usually posted via mobile and mapped to a locationg on Google maps.
I jumped on board for a week just to try it out. I was a little underwhelmed because it was like Twitter, but also aggregated your Twitter and other posts to it as well. But then I realised something funny. I Buzzed something similar to “Having tea and cake. Now for some decent ale!”. Fairly mundane I must admit, but I received a reply “tea… cake…. or death”. Lovely. The thing was, I had never even heard of the person who wrote this. It smacked a little of Youtube comments. Irrelevant, often odd, usually inappropriate. Twitter tends to be a great community of people tweeting, asking questions, being replied to in a normal “I’d say this in the same room as this guy” style.
Buzz may well suffer the Youtube scenario because Google products are aimed at everyone. A great thing in some ways, but “everyone” doesn’t know that although you are behind a screen, if you wouldn’t say something to someone’s face, you shouldn’t say it online. If you look at Vimeo, the comments are wholly different to Youtube as well. Generally more constructive and friendly.
The other issue is the signal to noise on this platform. It aggregates all content added by users, if they have added a Flickr account, you get their new photos, their new Youtube posts, their new Tweets from Twitter. It makes a very noisy part where, instead of receiving what you want to read, you get everything, all the time.
I think because of Google’s omni present nature, it will be used, possibly more than Twitter eventually as it is built in to just about every Google product already, but I don’t think I need more internet noise, and I certainly don’t want the Youtube commenter community even close to my online activity if at all avoidable.
