Google Buzz – What’s the Difference?
Sun, February 28th 2010 at 11:21am
After using Buzz for a little while it seems to be quite a different animal than Twitter or Facebook. While all three services are similar for the user posting the way they all handle replies from other users is what sets them apart.
Twitter is much more about consumption, and less about discussion. People post items on their feed and other people follow them to consume their posts. Any time I see people try to communicate back and forth with each other via Twitter it always degrades into a reply mess that no-one else can make sense off.
Say I am using twitter and some @replies me about a Tweet from four hours ago, I might reply to them “Good Point.” Now no one else following me stream has any idea about the context of that reply. They could probably piece it together, but it not worth the effort.
Facebook is meant to be much more closed off, although they are trying hard to get our personal information out there weather we like it or not. Facebook is much better at maintaining the contexts of comments by maintaining a comment thread. But the comments are not valued nearly as much as the original post. It can be hard to see if new comments have been added etc because posts are not bumped up when a new comment is made.
Google Buzz is like a hybrid of both Twitter and Facebook, it allows for completely public posting and followers, but at the same time you can do private posts to a group of people you designate at Friends, Coworkers, etc.
For me however the biggest difference is the way Google Buzz handles replies to Buzz’s. When a person replies or comments to a Buzz that buzz is bumped up in all the followers feeds. This effectively makes peoples comments as powerful as the original posters, and behaves much more like a traditional forum.
The way Buzz works right now is still a little un-wielding and I find it hard to follow public figures using Buzz just because the many people commenting keep all the “popular” buzz right at the top and drowns out everything else. This can be fixed with UI changes etc.
Buzz as a framework though is has some very powerful applications in integrating other services together, and I think might be a stepping stone to get people ready for the idea of using products like Wave.
Overall I am still using Twitter to keep track of things, and Facebook to stay in contact with Friends. But I hope that Google can make Buzz good enough that I can replace both of them.
Tags: Blog, Buzz, Google, Web Development
