Two Scoops of Buzz

Lots of Buzz buzz is still running through the internets yet, so here's a bit more of it, just in case you aren't burnt out yet. Google has added a one-button disable option to totally remove the system from Gmail. I'm sure someone there sure wishes that had been on by default. This is partially in response to a class action complaint and follows earlier cleanup efforts as well as an apology for auto-follow. Since there is no Facebook interaction, I still wonder what traction they will get. But maybe this means the end of Twitter.

Comments

might turn out to have been smart

[Trepidity]

While a lot of people are using this fiasco as evidence that Google's a bunch of techies who don't understand users, I can't really believe that it was totally unforseen and accidental. Google made a conscious decision to leverage their existing social graph of webmail users by, as automatically as possible, turning it into an actual social-network graph. If they hadn't done that, Buzz would probably not have jump-started very quickly, but now it has a huge built-in userbase. Even if a bunch of people disable it now, they're probably still way ahead in terms of total users than where they would've been if they had played nice.

So may turn out they did know what they were doing, at least from a business perspective.

Re:might turn out to have been smart

[Bill_the_Engineer]

While a lot of people are using this fiasco as evidence that Google's a bunch of techies who don't understand users, I can't really believe that it was totally unforseen and accidental.

At best, I view this as more evidence that Google isn't mature enough to be the 800 Lb gorilla of the Internet.

At worse, I see this as evidence that Google can be just as much as a monopoly threat as Microsoft was on the PC.

Re:End of twitter? not likely...

[jeffmeden]

Yeah, Google didn't stand a chance against the likes of Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, their spunky little upstart 'gmail' thing took forEVER just to get out of beta! Can't say that anyone was really attracted to it, what with all the established options out there. Who will take it seriously?!!

Re:Aardvark

[cayenne8]

I don't have any problem with Buzz showing up. I run the 'older version' of Gmail...

If you are on the newest version, just scroll to the bottom of the screen and click older version. This is not the HTML only version, but the one just before the new interface upgrade. I find it responsive, less cluttered...and no buzz.