Of course Google Buzz’ got a buzz: the Gmail team implemented it into every gmail inbox out there (around 100 million), without even providing an opt-out feature to kick it out of our traditional inbox. That inevitably gets conversations rolling. And since it’s there to buzz on forever, we might as well get used to it and find a way to use it appropriately.
Louis Gray muses on a basic and efficient way to organize your social data flow across mutliple social networks. What I like in his organization approach is the centrality of Friendfeed. I could not agree more with his idea that Friendfeed is the best social data flow management tool, whether it serves as a « content creator » or « content collector ».
However, I do not agree with the way he has integrated Buzz in his social data flow graph. First, Buzz is in the graph, and I don’t think it should be. Why? Simply because Buzz is in its infancy. It is merely a concept of social flow being tested within gmail. It’s all pretty basic and not so appealing. Mobile access is limited (ex: android 2.0 and up only), and we the geeks are not impressed to see a lighter, friendconnect-powered, friendfeed clone in yet another gmail tab. They should have launched it as a beta lab feature instead of bullying it up to our faces overnight.
My point: Buzz will become more interesting once it becomes what Louis Gray calls a « content creator ». For example, if I can tweet from Buzz, or update my Facebook page from Buzz, than Buzz will most probably become my social cockpit, since it’s almost already the case with gmail alone. I’m pretty sure that real-time wasn’t rolled out right away to maintain a manageable launch on 100 million accounts at once. Obviously, real-time Buzz is just around the corner.
My recommendation for Buzz is to maintain your ongoing social media strategy without trying to intricate Buzz in the process. Keep an eye on it though: Look who starts to follow you, follow a lot of people to see if Buzz manage to reduce the noise, look who’s being active in your network, what new features are being rolled out, and also track your traffic data to see if Buzz emerges as a significant traffic referrer.
Right now, most bloggers are not jeopardizing the control over their own social data flow on Buzz: Michael Arrington‘s buzz is his twitter and wordpress feed. Brian Solis doesn’t have a public buzz. So that’s it. Let’s wait for Google to roll out some more goodies before giving Buzz too much buzz. What do you think of Buzz so far? Is Google Buzz a winner?
