Google Buzz is here! How do we know? Because everybody's talking about it on, er, Twitter. Ho ho!
Cheap gags aside, Google Buzz is an interesting development - not because it's Google's latest attempt to move into social networking and not because it has some worrying privacy implications, but because it makes your email sociable.
Unlike Twitter or Facebook, which are designed as stand-alone systems, Buzz piggybacks on Google Mail, turning your email address book into a social network. There are some interesting ideas in it - for example, it uses a kind of PageRank so that you can filter out people's "What I am having for breakfast" messages without having to unfollow them altogether - but despite this, we're not convinced that our email really wants to turn into Twitter.
Don't get us wrong. It's probably a brilliant idea if you work for Google. If you're one of the hip young things at Google your address book is likely to include all the people you socialise with, because you probably socialise with the other hip young things at Google.
For those of us who don't work for a hot US tech company, however, our address books are more likely to include the people we don't socialise with - and that's the last group of people we want to be sharing our drunken, angry or downright disturbing status updates with.
Although it's possible to split personal and public - you can make posts private, which limits them to a selected readership - it's a lot of faff, isn't the default and clearly isn't what Google would like you to do.
As we've seen time and time again, a single social network where everyone is equal is a bloody disaster. Whether it's callow youths uploading stupid things and ruining their career prospects or sickie-pulling skivers who've forgotten the boss is part of their network, whenever the private, the personal and the professional come together you end up with photos of somebody's bare arse ending up in the wrong person's inbox.
Even if you're not posting things that could get you fired, chances are you have different audiences for different kinds of status updates - so there are things you'll happily post on Twitter that you wouldn't post on Facebook, or links you'll share on Facebook that you wouldn't email to your Dad.
That's a good thing, because the people we know aren't equal. We have fun friends and serious ones, close family and crazy relatives we keep at arm's length, acquaintances and people whose friend requests we only accepted because we thought they were somebody else. What's appropriate for some or even most of those people isn't appropriate for all of them.
Buzz is a very Google approach: having everything together - your email, your status updates, your documents, your YouTube favourites, your - cough - Google Waves - makes perfect sense to Google, because it just happens to be a brilliant way of amassing lots and lots of data about you. In the real world, however, things are a bit more complicated than that.
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Your comments (7) Click to add a new comment
paul
February 11th 2010
7. lth, you are right - I posted an earlier draft of the article which was missing the paragraph: "Although it's possible to split personal and public - you can make posts private, which limits them to a selected readership - it's a lot of faff, isn't the default and clearly isn't what Google would like you to do."
That's now been added. Sorry.
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kasino72
February 11th 2010
6. Hi lth. You're right about groups, but the way they've been implemented is - IMO - a pain. It looks to me like Google would much prefer you to be public.
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paul
February 11th 2010
5. @briantist It means we move in different social circles and adapt our behaviour accordingly :)
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briantist
February 11th 2010
4. Does this mean that every online person over 30 is schizophrenic, or just two-faced?
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mishac
February 11th 2010
3. I totally agree with this article. Once you pass 25 or so (or at least 30) and grow up a bit your networks start to become distinct entities in themselves, with a bit of cross-pollination. This goes double for those with kids.
I'm not sure what world the Google lads belong in, but it doesn't bear much similarity with my own. I personally have a LinkedIn account, have recently joined Facebook, and I use email as a vital tool for communication. I like being able to keep my networks at arms length and it doesn't matter what technology provides in the future, this is the way it will stay. We are human after all and for most people work is a part of their life, not their whole life.
Cheers, Misha
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lth
February 11th 2010
2. Except, oh look, buzz does have friends groups, you just have to set them up. So you're actually completely wrong :)
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lth
February 11th 2010
1. Apart from the massive, unavoidably visible panel every time you click on Buzz that lists everyone that you are following and followed by, you're right.
However, it is true to say that it really needs friends groups. But then, so does twitter.
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