Buzzed

A couple of us have been using the newly enable Google Buzz feature in Gmail. What’s Buzz? It’s kind of hard to explain.

Just a little off (to) the side (of gmail)

Got it? Alright.

I love that my non-twittering friends are now not only privy to my tweets (a dubious privilege, indeed) but able to respond at length without having to join Twitter themselves.

Not only this: they’re now able to converse with one another in the course of commenting. This is gold. When they said Buzz was like writing a message without a “To:” I wondered initially how that was different from Twitter or a Facebook update. I get it now.

With Buzz I can do what I thought I’d be able to do with Wave before I used it and got confused, frustrated, and finally bored.

I haven’t checked on my Wave account in months (has it been months?) but I’ve checked in on Buzz a dozen times already, not counting the emails (are they emails?) that alerted me via my Android phone that someone had commented on something in Buzz.

Of course I’ve checked in a bunch of times: it’s email. We all have email. Specifically, we all have Gmail.

If Wave has failed to take off it’s because it’s

• in need of some enterprising gang (Basecamp, can you hear me?) to build a killer app on top of it so we don’t have to Wave in the raw and
• requires another signup and the inconvenience that comes with migration.

By anchoring in Gmail, Buzz removes signup and migration pain in one step. And it’s got just enough functionality to make it interestingly messy, but not enough to overwhelm.

Buzz isn’t perfect right now but I won’t get into my quibbles with it because they’re boring, obvious, and probably already fixed and being tested as I write this. And I won’t say “this will fundamentally change email” because prognostications are just as boring as complaints.

But I will say that I think sharing stuff on the internet with my friends just became a little bit easier and therefore made the internet a little bit more fun.

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