By now, Google Buzz’s privacy blunders are beginning to fade from the Internet’s short-term, 140byte-sized memories. It’s clear that the fiasco has lost Google some early enthusiasm and a number of important early adopters, there is still are plenty of people who are starting to use Buzz.
Why should anybody want another social network? What’s so different about Buzz? Don’t we already have Facebook and Twitter? (Does anybody still use MySpace?).
It’s clear that Buzz’s user interface needs work. And there are also lots of comments that Google Buzz is really “one more damn inbox I have to check”.
And this first version of Buzz (Buzz 0.9?) has all the feel of another Google Beta. But I’m sure it will improve over time.
What is more interesting is to look a few months down the road, and examine some of the features Google plans to roll out.
And in the end, it Google doesn’t really just want to be “another inbox” or “another network” – what they really want to do is to change the way social networking will work for everybody.
The State of the Social Networks.
But first it helps to review the current state of social networking today. Just a quick review of the two biggest networks:Facebook and Twitter, give us enough comparative difference to see how Google Buzz has the potential to be an entirely new animal than we have seen before.
Both Facebook and Twitter represent the current “state-of-the-art” in social media, but in obvious and very different ways.
Facebook is a Walled Garden.
Facebook has followed the Walled Garden approach social networking. It has built it’s own little friendly world full of people who are already supposed to like you, and want to be your friend.
Users need mutually approve each other in order to create a connection on Facebook. This helps validate that both people really have an established relationship and a desire to connect.
Facebook connects you to family or friends or coworkers. Facebook’s strength is in that it built social networks around the existing circles people already had: Work, School, Family, Neighborhood etc. The people that join Facebook and stay, do so not because of Facebook itself, but because it’s the source of media created by people you know.
Grandparents see their grandkid’s Youtube postings. 4o-somethings staring at tiny postage stamp avatars of their High School buddies and try to figure out if that person got more less fat than they have. College kids planning impromptu parties or political rallies.
Even much of the successful “application spam” uses language that tells users that i’s their “Friends” needs help on their farm. We click on “invites” from our friends because each message represents an invitation to play with our friends!. When we are told that our friends have ranked us by beauty or humour (not some impersonal computer), we click on the link. Facebook is designed to feel like a world that you enter and hang out for a while, that is filled with content from your friends. (or Application Spam that pretends to be).
It’s external connections to the rest of the Internet are usually cleanly controlled through a well defined, comfortable wall. Facebook wants to be your primary home on the internet, with minimal excursions to other websites.
YouTube and other media links are now automatically embeded when a user sticks a URL into their Status Updates. Otherwise, a URL link might cause a member to leave the domain.
MySpace (and orkut and others) have tried the exact same walled garden strategy, but Facebook success is partially based in it’s stronger privacy controls and a 3rd party API that increases the range and type of content users can enjoy.
But Facebook Developers must request API keys in order to integrate their 3rd party content. This gives Facebook complete control to limit, block or kick out content providers that threaten the business model in any way. This also means they must monitor and police all the content on the site, because it’s aways wrapped in a nice Facebook background.
Facebook Connect has allowed some 3rd party developers to stick small approved “cracks” in the walled garden. It allows you to use your Facebook account to authorize “off-site” content. But in the end, Facebook’s revenue is driven by advertising. So they need their users eyes to wander back to “home”.
Twitter is everywhere.
Where Facebook has a wall, Twitter has a barely minimal border set of border controls. In general sending a twitter is usually a public act.
While it’s possible to control and approve who can see your tweets, most people are posting and consume messages that are 100%, open to the world.
Unlike Facebook, users on Twitter maintain much weaker relationships between themselves and other users. You don’t have friends, you have followers. You usually don’t need to ask permission to Follow, but you can be blocked if people don’t want you reading their stuff.
But the service thrives on tweets that are free to fly to everybody. The zeitgeist of the Twitterverse is that each tiny abbreviated message is a broadcast to the world, to be consumed by everyone.
Twitter could fix the 140 character limit issues quite easily if they wanted to at this point. But the true magic of twitter is brevity. It’s almost always written as single sentence, and often include a link back to some other piece of media.
Tweets are time sensitive. Since users might be constantly flooded, a single msg will be immediately consumed and then immediately shared or discarded. It’s the ability to broadcast messages that represent what is happening at this moment, that gives it the greatest amount of meaning for most users.
From random photos and human emotions, to news bulletins and Presidential Proclamations , twitter tells us what is happening now. At the heart of every tweet is the implied prefix that each tweet has announces to the world: “Hey – check this out:”.
Twitter is now interconnected to every major media outlet on the Internet - every news outlet, every celebrity, every political movement – they all are tweeting, (or are at least ghost-tweeting). A failure to participate in Twitter is a failure to participate in the world’s largest and fastest moving conversation.
Twitter Trends are now more important than Google Trends in measuring the daily temperature of the Internet. What people are searching for can often be very different than what they talking about. And it’s far better representation of people care about.
But all this chaos, also means that social groups on twitter are amorphous and ever changing. A single #hashtag on Twitter can allow people to instantly join thousands of other users , all participating in the meme of the hour.
Twitter’s success lied in a simple and open API that allowed for it to be seamlessly integrated into blogs and websites (and even to Facebook and Buzz). There was never an attempt to create a walled garden. Most users are no longer creating nor consumed tweets at the twitter.com website anymore. Mobile phones put Twitter in every place on the planet. Twitter’s lack of any advertising made people doubt that it could ever make a cent.
But it’s now the de-facto source to track the momentary thoughts and desires the entire planet. Access to that data is worth millions.
Whereas Facebook wants to be the “home” where you will find your friends, Twitter is the “what” that they are all trying to share.
But the strength of Twitter also creates a whole new problem – the information is barely manageable. Twitter has had to create it’s own lingo. And while it’s easy to see what’s being retweeted, it can be hard to follow conversations. Twitter clients, like TweetDeck and Seesmic, try to wrangle the unstopping onslaught of often mindless chatter, into ways that are easier to manage and consume.
The problem with being the “system we didn’t know we needed” is that Twitter wasn’t originally designed to handle both the rate and content that users are demanding. They want better media support, more filters, less noise, threaded conversations, etc. But because Twitter supported a simple but powerful API, the 3rd-party services like bit.ly and TweetPic quickly have filled in some of the gaps.
It being open and free trumped the fact that it was originally slapped together with spit and tape.
But if you had the chance to start from scratch and rebuild a “new and better” Twitter, how would you do it?
Enter Google:
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