Fran's Blog

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.

I’ve been reading a couple of similar posts recently (links below) which have been talking, roughly, about the same thing. That, on the whole, successful websites are using gaming rules. Or the coolest ones anyway. I do find this interesting. We’re in an age where the first generation of gamers are now grown and well into careers. We hark back to the glory days with some excitement, we now see the 118 118 commercials going for the 80s theme tunes (A-team, Ghostbusters) and Mr T and david Hasselhoff are stars once more. It makes sense!

Anyway, read these articles to get the general idea:
Coding Horror: The World’s Largest MMORPG: You’re Playing it Right Now
9 reasons Japanese interactive work is awesome (you only need to read point 3)

Ratings, reviews, reputation make one want to contribute. If you look at my current favourite geek site Stack Overflow it is based on making people want to contribute because they get a reputation mark if they get the answer right for the person asking. Some sites even allow you to unlock certain sections once they have enough points.

Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube do something similar in their own different way. Youtube, for example, has number of views your video has got and a scoring panel. Flickr allows favourites, adding photos to groups. The general concept is there. And the best sites? The BEST ones? They are simple to just pick up and play.

Fantastic. It makes one want to use and contribute to the site with a very simple premise which is generally free and built into a lot of our psyches.