Google Buzz

In the wake of the announcement and launch, I feel utterly compelled to write a blog post about the new service from Google.

It’s not long since the launch of Google Wave, a new service from Google to socially & semantically share content through a system that’s designed to, in essence, replace email. However, a few months on from a service that I really loved, and felt addressed various fundamental flaws within the archaic email systems we all use, Wave has fallen by the way-side and feels like the forgotten child of a rather distracted, ADHD-infused parent.

Google’s current trend towards desperately playing catch up to social media outlets is worrying. Google in the past were a mighty company. By no means are they anything but that now, but they’ve slowly been eroding their “nice guy” reputation in recent months in this ridiculous attempt to own everything on the internet. What happened to simply providing a means to sort the content out there and make it searchable? Remember, Google’s entire business was built on pagerank – a system that has stopped trying to filter content for you, and now deals with how to avoid people who “cheat” the system. Google’s algorithms have not made the vast amount of information out their easier to search. Rather, they’ve been stuffing your search bars with pre-built keywords and phrases to make your search terms easier for google. Not the other way around. It’s almost like they’re frustrated with the web users.

Wave has stopped being used almost entirely. A nice Irish community built up around it, but weeks after launch the same old cries of it being slow and tiresome to use came as people flocked back to Twitter and Facebook – to complain about Wave. It’s clear the huge Australian team have stopped trying to optimise their still-in-beta (to avoid harsh criticisms, in fairness) service, but instead have gone back to working on something else in Google.

Buzzing in your Gmail

And so we get to Buzz. This service basically meshes the best bits of Twitter and Facebook to combine them into a similar “status update” system for friends, or a public timeline. This will, like Facebook, pull photos and videos from URLs and do everything on-the-fly, quickly and effectively. Lovely. But Facebook already does that. What’s even worse is, possibly on the back of Wave’s failings (and I’m not totally criticising it, I hope Google go back, focus and make it great), Google have implemented this entire “social web” front into their darling child of the last few years – Gmail. Gmail genuinely is brilliant, and “fixed” the problems that Hotmail, Ymail and other free email services had. Adding chat and video conferencing made things a little more complex – and are features I’ve used once. Literally. Chat? I have that with MSN and iChat… same goes for video calls, which I can also avail of through Skype. All of these services with dedicated communities who already expressed an interest in this. Who woke up one morning and thought it was a disgrace that Gmail doesn’t let you video conference? Why did Google decide to tack that system on? And now, it’s way worse. Because “Buzz” is being tacked into Gmail to take advantage of that community of users. This is because Google know damn well they won’t pull users from Facebook or Twitter with an independent service. Just look at Orkut.

Between Wave, Buzz, phones, operating systems and browsers, Google has left behind it’s core principles. Sorting information. They’re moving towards building a comprehensive database of people, rather then building a comprehensive manner in which to find relevant information in all that internet “noise”. In the 90′s when Google began, it didn’t try to become every website. It only sought to sort them out for you by a matter of relevance. Now, rather then trying to help you sort people and their shared information on twitter etc., they’re attempting to become these services themselves.

I like Google. Hell, like most software people out there, I would love to work for them. I’d wear the t-shirt and cycle the Google-branded bike to work and sing rah-rah-rah from the rooftops about how great the food in the canteen is. However, I would like to reel Google back in. Stop being all things for everyone. You’re losing your principles. Too much diversity is causing these systems to be too hap-hazard and “in the moment”. I don’t feel like I’ll be using Wave or Buzz in 5 years in the same way I’ve been using gmail or google maps. These systems offer a brilliant service, free, solve issues with similar services and are a way of meaningfully “sorting” information relevant to me, personally. Neither Wave, Buzz, Android or any Google-branded hardware do any of this. They do not meet the simple metric of doing something better then what’s out there (Android is certainly not better then iPhone OS, Wave isn’t better then Gmail, and Buzz isn’t better then Facebook), and they do not help me sort information. I could go into the fact that all of these new systems have literally no cross-over with each other, but I won’t delve too deep. Gmail and search is blended, just like maps and Google docs. Where’s Wave or Buzz coming into this? They’re not. They can’t because these systems are weak, non-Google like and aren’t answering any fundamental issues on the web.

Basically, it comes down to this: I like Google. I like what they do. They’ve helped shape the web and create something special out of relatively simple technology. This is why I wrote this. I want Google to drop the “catch-up” games. They’re developing weaker software then ever before… and forgetting stuff that needs to be fixed as they get distracted by shiny things over somewhere else. Let Twitter and Facebook exist. Let the iPhone exist. Use them to your advantage, but don’t try to take them over or be them. That’s not your job.

Interestingly, as I wrote this my RSS popped up with a post from @cloudsteph about her favourite Buzz feature… the off button