As you saw in a couple of previous posts, google released his social tool called google buzz (not to be confused with yahoo’s one…).
I tried though it still does not work in google apps, and it is pretty good. It is sort of twitter with location and photos, in fact if you read me, you will see that in a way this is what I was looking for… well no.
Yes, it does have all the ingredients: location, you can follow people and in a way is like twitter on steroids (which is great), you can have it in your gmail, there is a cool mobile version too… but…
Well the but is the but I had with google wave. A lot of people can follow you but you need a google account. Like wave, where ended up being a very promising tool but from the moment that it is closed to google users (or wave users which is worse) then is meant to have a difficult future. With buzz the pool is bigger, as there are a lot of google users, but it is still not like email where you can send email across systems, or like twitter where you can just shout and everybody can see it, and follow you.
Did we need another social tool?
Most of us are happy with facebook and twitter. Twitter is limited as I said in the past (location, photos, etc…) but it is big.
Do you think buzz could be a twitter killer? Maybe…
We are starting to have a bit of fatigue on social tools. Recently I posted an article on location based apps, well I got several emails from little companies and I tried all their products. Some are good, but it will be difficult to beat foursquare which looks like is the most established.
For the time being I stick to facebook (for my friends), twitter (for the world), and brightkite to post in both (location and photos). For location foursquare and tellmewhere.
I keep trying buzz and latitude, that by the way, how do they live together? Looks like they don’t know each other…
By the way, google should work harder on integration. I would like to merge all my accounts under one profile and for the time being is not possible…
3 comments
Comment by dani
dani February 12, 2010 at 11:04 am
by the way, from the browser in the iPhone you cannot upload photos to buzz. This is a big problem for me.
Comment by Raphael.Aguiar
Raphael.Aguiar February 27, 2010 at 12:07 am
There`s just one problem regarding GWave in your analysis: it`s not meant to run only for Google users. Actually it is an open-source features that may be set up in any server, even without Google Apps or any google account.
Comment by dani
dani February 27, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Raphael, you are right. Wave is distributed in open source, and could be the future, as you can run it on linux for instance. What I ment is that it is a new protocol so it just talks to wave, no smtp, so you limit the scope to wave users, that for now are mostly in google.