Google Buzz

From what I've seen so far, Buzz is what twitter should be. It's like the best features of Facebook and Twitter all mashed up in a big Googley ball. I'd really like to see an implementation of Buzz in Digsby similar to that of our twitter integration.

Feel free to discuss Buzz as a product and as a Digsby feature in this thread.

I should note that we are not currently working on Buzz in Digsby and I have no idea when we'll start (and therefore I don't know if/when it would be available for testing). I hope it's soon though!

Actually, to me, Buzz just looks like yet another attempt by an email.messenger service to jump on the social networking band wagon. Yahoo tried twice in the past with 360 and Mash. Log in to Yahoo mail and you see a set up almost identical to Gmail buzz. Log in to Hotmail or Live mail and you are faced with a page showing all the recent activity from your friends.

Gmail Buzz is nothing new and, like Yahoo's and MSN's social networking, will not get used at all except maybe for a little while as people play with it.

I think it's main problem will be that it just doesn't look that good. I mean look at my profile.

Last edited by carbonize (2010-02-10 12:41:34)

If someone replies to one of your Buzzs you get notified in your inbox so Digsby notifies you as it gets treated like a normal email.

Just remembered that Google actually tried to get in to social networking before with Orkut and failed miserably except in Brazil.

Thankfully in gmail it's treated very differently, with "replies" acting as comments on the buzz and all that.

I guess the problem with a service like this is that people just don't want another account to deal with. The fact that I'm logged into GMail literally all day long (I have the tab stickied at work and at home) means that if (somehow) the entire twitter userbase transplanted to buzz, I'd have one less thing to check. If someone doesn't regularly use GMail then I would definitely understand (and expect) the traditional "yet another account" complaints from them.

As for the appearance of profiles, I really don't care at all. Profile pages aren't the main interface for the service (the tab in GMail is) and beside that it's not like twitter is all that attractive either... especially since users have control over color schemes and backgrounds and we all know how that worked out for MySpace. Facebook only looks good if you strip out lots of the apps and are left with their basic blue/white color scheme. If you throw in mafia wars, farmville and "what kind of peanut butter are you? lol" quiz requests then Facebook starts looking pretty ugly too.

Also, if that's its main problem as you say, then I say it's doing pretty damn good. Cosmetic issues are easily fixed. For web apps, the service provider can just change the stylesheets, or if they refuse to then users can do it (nearly every browser has a way to apply custom stylesheets). On top of that, there will be third-party clients of all sorts. I'm surprised there isn't one yet, to be honest.


Edit: If Orkut is Google's Facebook, Buzz is Google's Twitter. However, since Google seems to have given up on Orkut outside of Brazil I think they're interested in competing with Facebook with Buzz as well. Buzz takes the asymmetric "follow/following" concept from twitter and combines it with the in-depth "sharing" concept of facebook. In my opinion this is the best of both worlds.

BRB checking to see if buzz integrates with orkut ;-)
Edit: it doesn't. I'm not surprised.

Last edited by mike (2010-02-10 14:31:54)

Approved on the wishlist, http://digsbies.org/site/content/wishlist/google-buzz

Go vote!!

eia wrote:

Approved on the wishlist, http://digsbies.org/site/content/wishlist/google-buzz

Go vote!!

Would sooner they spent their time fixing bugs and stabilising the core stuff before looking at adding more protocols.

@Mike - Has work started on plug in architecture for Digsby yet? I do think that Trillian and Miranda have the right idea of using plug ins for all their protocols as it makes it easier to add more.

every time we add a new protocol we work a little more on the plugin architecture. if you look in the digsby program directory, you'll find the lib\plugins folder which contains everything that's been successfully "pluginified" so far.

Hmm but they are all still Python code. I was thinking more of dlls so that way others could write plugins in whatever their chosen language is.

carbonize wrote:

Hmm but they are all still Python code. I was thinking more of dlls so that way others could write plugins in whatever their chosen language is.

lol, because it's that easy!

Dave wrote:

carbonize wrote:

Hmm but they are all still Python code. I was thinking more of dlls so that way others could write plugins in whatever their chosen language is.

lol, because it's that easy!

actually, it is: http://docs.python.org/extending/extending.html

and before anyone goes complaining about "that's just the python API in C", there are several higher-level ways to get python to talk to regular C/C++/ObjC/whatever.  See also: Pyrex, Cython, SIP, SWIG.  Honorable mention, yet not relevant: Jython, IronPython.

I'll argue that depending on the context, it really is that easy, which is to say, still a pain, but not really that bad if you know what you're doing.

And if you go looking, you'll see we use plenty of wrapped libraries in Digsby.

And back on topic.

Buzz will also display the last post from your blog or your last tweet on Twitter as you can see from viewing my profile (link above). But if they are trying to replace Twitter why display tweets :-/

The main reasons I don't see it replacing Twitter are:
1 - To many celebrities and organisations already Tweeting
2 - Buzz is to tightly linked to your Gmail where as twitter is a seperate thing.

To elaborate on 2 I have friends and family in my Gmail contacts and they all are going to start following me on Buzz just because Google suggests they do but I use Twitter to announce new builds of my scripts and that's not really something my family cares about. So I use Facebook for friends and family and I use Twitter for clients and other people who use my scripts.

carbonize wrote:

But if they are trying to replace Twitter why display tweets :-/

they need to get people to transition somehow; people aren't going to just up and leave twitter and google knows that.

as for having different audiences between buzz & twitter i wouldn't be surprised if they added facebook-like permissions to each post ("who can see this"). if you look at the contact info page when editing your google profile you can see they have a mechanism like that already. they just need to apply it to the public/private dropdown in buzz in useful way.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/11 … z_privacy/

Interesting reading even if some of it is tosh.

Last edited by carbonize (2010-02-11 10:58:30)

To me, Buzz strikes me less as a Twitter replacement than a content sharing mechanism. Twitter is just find for jotting down a quick broadcast message, but is far from ideal for sharing media such as photos or video. I'll likely mostly be using my Buzz for my Google Reader and other sharing and Twitter when I want to say something.

Now if only they had a way of automagicly posting my Buzzes to Twitter too without creating a loop...

I assume you have already looked at the Buzz API and here is a guide to some of it's features.

Well that's a new one. Just logged in to Gmail and got told I had a new Buzz. When did they start having it show your Gtalk status? Why the hell would you want to use your Gtalk status as a buzz

you can disable that if you take google talk out of your "connected sites".

Yeah I've done that just don't remember adding it in the first place. Things like that should be opt in not opt out.

bump. I want buzz!!!