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Entries in Wave (2)

Tuesday

Feb162010

Google Buzz

Tue, February 16, 2010 at 02:24PM

So.. is Buzz just 'Wave' but squashed into gmail?

It depends who or what you read.

For me it's just as bemusing as Wave, in that I'm still figuring out if it is more useful as an info source or easier for me to 'connect' than via my 3 existing (pretty ubiquitous) channels of Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook.

Actually - I have been thinking of trimming down my Facebook friend's as I just can't absorb or process the myriad of status updates from (some) nebulous 'friends'.
I don't mean that in a dismissive way, I've probably accepted some friend requests in the past with good intention but as I've used it more and more, I realise that I need to trim down to retain just those with real resonance and a reciprocal connection / affection.

My wider work/social/life network may be best served via twitter.. although some would argue that that should be clearly one OR the other not the hybrid usage I have it for on occasion.

So - Buzz.. better than the triad mentioned above? A new layer of connections and saring or a subset of detail I finf it hard to give time or headspace to? A coherent social network rising from the GoogleSoup which will ultimately dominate the web?

Possibly - but only when it is free from Googlemail. I'm in mail mode to read 1 to 1 long hand messages, not to browse interesting articles or comment on photos.

A standalone twitter-like presence for Buzz would serve it better I think. Though the iphone App helps me differentiate form email nicely, to be fair.

There is a great succinct round up of what Buzz hopes to be is here at techcrunch:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/09/if-google-wave-is-the-future-google-buzz-is-the-present/

I watched the Googlebuzz launch vid and it all looks great but I may be missing something - not all my contacts are on googlemail (by a long way) so facebook or twitter will still be the way to share photos / videos or external sites. Or maybe I've missed something in that.

Buzz was launched with some degree of pushback from the 200 million (I think?) Gmail users who were concerned about how to control posts / published contacts etc.. but Google seems to have quickly made privacy settings changes or at least clarified options for users, which is laudable.

"We've been getting feedback via the Gmail help forums and emails from friends and family, and we've also been able to do something new: read the buzz about Buzz itself. We quickly realized that we didn't get everything quite right. We're very sorry for the concern we've caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback. We'll continue to do so."

I'll spend more time noodling with Buzz for a while but I can feel the urge to abandon it as I did for Wave .. which could be a it premature perhaps!

Mark |

Drowning not Waving

Thu, October 29, 2009 at 03:33PM

Apologies to poet Stevie Smith for the stolen title

Google Wave could be THE best collaboration tool available, but not yet.

Firstly, if you haven’t seen Google Wave in action and don’t want to sit through the eight (or so) minutes of the official Google wave overview (see YouTube), have a look at the very nice overview from EpipheoStudios.com:

It sometimes feels like it would be easy to drown in the noise of a connected world with email (or worse, ubiquitous cc lists), social network status updates and tweets; but does Google Wave help streamline our conversations and collaborations?
Or does it just add to the noise, especially when eventually you may have a dozen ongoing Wave / threads running in one interface and you want to follow or add to them all?

It is Really Useful technology? No. It’s a noise (wave?) amplifier and I didn’t expect to be so negative when I got my beta invite through.
It fails in my opinion, on a few fronts:

> the beta / limited test group approach has meant that a tool made for mass collaboration and dynamic interchange has been starved of participants... so no one to play with and to jointly experiment with Wave’s functionality

that better expressed view is also here (thanks @curlydena for tweeting this) :

> the speed of collaboration is really slow, I’m not sure why – if it’s my macbook architecture that is rendering conversations too slow (doubt it ?) or the Google servers or the cloud or.. But it seems to take forever to watch responses or shared conversations take shape in the GUI

> The ability to edit someone else’s thoughts as they are typing them out is not a great one for two finger typers like me who cant touch type and have to look at the keyboard a lot..
My colleague/co-tester Marv was cheekily editing or erasing my words even as I was contributing to the discussion. Git.

> More worryingly, a Wave we set up as a closed work group to spoof a collab project across 2 geographical sites just disappeared. Gulp.
E.g the whole wave is now BLANK. Only 3 of us were in the closed group and none of us cleared out the Wave... I can still see it in the inbox panel but nothing shows on the right hand side ‘live’ Wave panel... WHOOPS Google, that not good.

> the GUI is definitely dev only, it needs some more work for sure but I’m guessing there will be custom skins / templates or 3rd party front ends at some stage

>I think there are enough other tools out there for collab, forward planning, knowledge sharing, that are less confusing to use. Wikis, nings, twitter lists, facebook groups etc etc
That said, maybe if it was run in the workplace, with corporate content secured and with a manageable user base it will be a must-use of the future, as long as content doesn’t just disappear! (See above)
You may have read this but Robert Scoble had a strong view on Wave

I’ll keep checking on Wave to see if the largest Group I’m part of (19 or so people who have hooked up to share at least one Wave) actually make anything of it.
In the meantime, it’s not yet for me.

Mark |

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