Buzz Off, Buzz

As you know from reading some of my past blogs, I do enjoy the social aspect of Web 2.0, to use some of the language all the cool kids use. I am now back on Twitter and understanding it a lot more, for example I was able to follow what was happening at the Olympics simply by following the various Olympic based hashtags, so I knew when Canada had won a medal and the nation certainly did win a lot of them. I'm also on Facebook and post a lot there.

If I can go back to Twitter for just a moment, I do understand it and know why it is so popular and has such great press. Just recently it was reported people post something like 600 tweets a second or 50 million a day. That is an amazing number of tweets and while it has also been pointed out a very large majority of them are dumb, the classic "eating popcorn in my beanbag chair", or "today the cat horked up a hairball". There is some good news aggregates happening and the information that can be posted and read is quite amazing, especially if you follow the trends of the day. If something happens that is big, it's going to be on Twitter.

As for Facebook, its for friends and family isn't it? It's where you can post some news, photographs and videos. I know there's a lot of those games, such as Mafia Wars and FarmVille, things I have managed to avoid, thank you very much. So its good way to keep in touch with others and pass on information.

One of my other favourites if Pikchur. it's a good place to post the photographs and send it to all the sites I frequent. It does make life easy for me.

I could go on, Brightkite, Plurk, all places I hang out to post and interact.

As you can expect, when Google announced Buzz, i was interested. When the announcement was made I immediately went to gmail and waited for it to show up in my inbox, or at least on the side of my account. After all, another social network, one simply can't have enough of those.

The information was posted to a google blog with this as part of the pitch:

Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It's built right into Gmail, so you don't have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there's always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don't have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you're sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.

Yup, waited and when it showed up I quickly got it going in my gmail account. I could go into a long explanation of it, but just follow this link to PCWorld. It lasted a week. After that time, I decided to read up on how to get rid of Buzz.

Yes that is right, I am not using it right now. The reason I had was not the security or privacy concerns that some have pointed out in posts and articles. I simply found it too noisy, which is interesting because that is the one thing Google wanted to avoid. it was too much and very confusing to follow. I didn't care to much for how it was set up and the fact that Buzz was clogging up my inbox. There was also the fact that so many people were following me and I wasn't sure where they were coming from or why did they want to follow me. Not that there is anything wrong with having people following me, but I discover it becomes too much if there are too many following. That is what caused me to give up my first account with Twitter.

There is the privacy issue as well, Molly Wood had a very informative post in her rant about Buzz.

Buzz is no longer a part of my gmail account. Does this mean I'll never use it. I don't know, perhaps in a month or two I may venture back and discern if it has improved. If it has, I may use it in a limited way, if not, I won't use it again.

That is my google blog for today.

You can follow me on all those social network sites I have links to, see you there.