Buzz buzz

So is the buzz over Google Buzz done already? Wow, that was pretty fast. Looking at my own Buzz feed, I see a lot of activity from my friends during that first week and now nothing at all. I guess everyone was eager to try it out but then lost interest in the service.

During the first couple of days a bunch of my friends started a couple fun random threads, mostly revolving around the "what the heck is this?" topic. I even used it for some real purpose during a group meeting at school. Our group was interviewing a senior executive via phone conference, and since we weren't all in the same location we needed a way to 'chat' with each other during the phone call to coordinate the follow-up questions. We decided to try out Google Buzz for chatting and to store interview notes. It actually worked out pretty well and helped the two hour event go by pretty quickly (the interview subject was a little dry).

I'm personally not a huge fan of Buzz. I like the technology and the features built into it, but I don't really like the fact that it's hooked up into my Gmail contact list. I shoot out emails to a lot of different people for different reasons and I don't necessarily want to build a 'social network' around some of those people. That's what my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts are for.

There are tons of articles about Google Buzz out right now, but here are some of my favorites:

Pete Cashmore asks: What is Buzz good for? If Facebook is the local bar, and Twitter is the town square, where does that leave Buzz?

Erick Schonfeld talks about the privacy risks of Buzz: "The danger in creating an instant social network around email contacts, as Google Buzz does with Gmail, is that the boundaries between what is private and what is public are not always clear."

And easily my favorite article about Buzz: "Google and Social: Like Nerds at the Dance" by Matthew Ingram, detailing out some of the design flaws behind Buzz and the perils of asking engineers to architect social networking.