When I joined the company a month ago, I was baited with the promise that Google was ready to get serious about the social web.
Yesterday’s launch of Google Buzz and the fledgling Google Buzz API is like a downpayment on what I see as Google’s broader social web ambitions, that have been bubbling beneath the surface for some time. Understand that Buzz is not entirely an end unto itself, but a way for Google to get some skin in the game to promote the use and adoption of different open technologies for the social web.
In fact, I’d argue that Buzz is as much about Google creating a new channel for conversation in a familiar place as it is about how we’re going about building its public developer surfaces. Although today’s Buzz API only offers a real-time read-only activity stream, the goal is to move quickly towards implementing a host of other technologies — most of which should be familiar to readers of this blog.
As Kevin Marks observes, in order to address the mess of the social web that Mike Arrington described, we need widespread use [of common standards] so that we can generalize across sites
— and thus enable people to interact and engage across the web , rather than being restricted to any particular silo of activity — which may or may not reflect their true social configuration.
In other words, standards — and in particular social web standards — are the lingua franca that make it possible for uninitiated web services to interact in a consistent manner. When web services use standards to commoditize essential and basic features, it forces them to compete not with user lock-in, but by providing better service, better user experience, or with new functionality and utility. I am an advocate of the open web because I believe the open web leads to increased competition, which in turn affords people better options, and more leverage in the world.
Buzz is both a terrific product, and a great example of how the social web is evolving and becoming truly ubiquitous. Buzz is simply one more stitch in the fabric of the social web.
16 Comments
Keep it coming, Chris. Your posts from the inside, looking at it from the outside, help us all distill the hype from the real, erm, buzz. More please!
Its a shame that a service like Google Buzz was not created and is not owned by the open source community.
If this were the case it would have more than likely been interoperable out of the box; and if needed any missing services could have been added. If Buzz was an owned by the open source community More than likely federation would be one of the top priorities.
The fact is that most products developed by companies will always put the companies intrest above those of true openness
http://www.factoetum.com/factoetum/factoetum
It would be nice for me to be able to import my Flickr contacts into Google Buzz today.
Why isn’t that possible?
Right on
Also, why didn’t you build OpenSocial support into Google Buzz from the start?
Most of the conversation over the last 24h has been centered around predicting if “Buzz will kill” this or that service. This debate starts from the assumption that Buzz and the rest of the social web are mutually exclusive. It’s arguably fair to assume so, considering all the social networks we’ve got so far are silos. To no longer assume everyone has to be using the same branded system to talk to each other is disruptive to the tech biz discourse, which is obsessed with turning everything into a war over which company is “the one”. So much so that the alternative is almost unthinkable. If the new standards succeed, in 2015 we’ll look back and shake our heads like we shake our heads today at the early days of proprietary phone networks and email systems. The thought that you couldn’t call, text or email people just because they happen to be on another phone operator or email client is laughable. Doubly so for the social Web. The reason many of the current commentators miss this point is that they are, in the immortal words of Walt Whitman, “demented with the mania of owning things.” (borrowing that quote from Doc Searls)
I don’t know, but I’m guessing priorities and time were contributors. What aspects of OpenSocial would you like to see Buzz support?
Contact importing isn’t entirely obvious yet. It’s also something that will be definitely improved over time.
I don’t know what the schedule is — but contact import (export already largely exists!) is certainly an area for improvement.
Federation *is* one of the top priorities. Much of the tech to make it happen, however, isn’t widely deployed and needs a lot of interface work.
While it may be true than an open source, community driven project might have such features out of the box, I’ve also learned that open source isn’t enough to make federation happen — you have to have partners to federate with first!
Still, keep an eye on Status.net, for one open source effort that’s well aligned with Buzz.
At once my voice is both meaningless and monumental. I agree standards is where we (“The People”) need to push “conversations” to. But my voice is meaningless as I am just a hobbyist/tinkerer with 3 followers that care what I think. But my voice is monumental when included as one of the millions creating a Network Effect to get “social media”/”conversations” to become widely used allowing other “meaningless” voices to come up with new and original ideas help make this all less-techie and make the client apps (UIs and workflows) more usable by people who couldn’t care less about technology and just want to communicate with their friends.
Chris, contact portability is an important idea. It would seem to me that allowing me to import my contacts from other sites ought to be a priority for this product.
I suspect (and worry) that the reason why I can’t import my flickr contacts (based on their choice to share their email address with me) is because Flickr is a silo and is not good about letting me control my own social graph outside of Flickr. It would be nice to see someone from Google look into this specifically and if this is in fact the case try to start a conversation on why contact portability is an important thing.
Right now I can only see a few hundred of my contacts Flickr photos in Buzz. I have to go to Flickr itself to see the other 15,000. It shouldn’t have to be that way.
Hi Chris.
Interoperability and transportability of all collaborative web data is the key to user freedom and healthy competition on merit.
I’d like to see these same trends extend not just over and through the web, but throughout all devices, information systems, and services. I’d like the world to be read/write.
Buzz needs to have a feature that is strong enough to move people like me off Facebook, or at least makes it worthwhile for me to go to both Facebook and Buzz. This is not impossible as I regularly checks LinkedIn (more professional), QZone (All my China contacts are on it). And it has a very short timeframe to convince us.
If it doesn’t build up a critical mass among early adopters, the steam will run out, and the product will collapse like a bad souffle.
While true standards are nice-to-have, de facto standards and platforms have already dominated the social networking field, and trying to change all that, would take considerable effort on all parties, plus FB makes some serious missteps a la Friendster.
Not impossible, but unlikely.
so now rumors are spreading about Buzz being separated from Gmail… now sure this would be a smart move
I have to say, this is the first time that Google has really turned me off, I’d even say truly upset me. I hold Gmail out as one of the finest web apps, or software apps on the planet, but the way Buzz was injected into it, with no buy in from the users, completely repulses me. I did not ask or give permission to Google to “connect” me to all these random people I may have emailed with in the past (and half the connections that were made automatically for me certainly do seem random – 1 email back and forth with someone doesn’t count for much). Buzz in and of itself, may wind up being good or useful or whatever, but due to the introduction, the “invasion of privacy” and the really poor way this was launched, I’m now completely turned off.
I do hope that Google can recognize that they introduced this the wrong way – you don’t force folks into it and start creating connections without anyone’s consent – and remove it, or at least make it fully opt-in.
Mr. Messina, I have to say, I’m really a bit surprised. From reading your blog, I considered you one fighting the good fight for strong authentication and similar standards, which to me relate to privacy concerns. Thus, quite honestly, the above post comes across sounding like a PR piece.
Chris,
I think peoples expectation was that if *Google* acts
authoritatively, with expectations from tiny entities
(speed up your sites or disappear, mom & pop),
then they sure shouldn’t launch a security nightmare.
To me, it’s symptomatic of a company seeing only
from a revenues-potential perspective.
I can’t imagine one person there thought like a normal user,
and didn’t have it strike them ahead of time.
I’ve liked a lot of your opinions and work over time, Chris,
most recently your quick mind on http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2010/01/18/designing-hashtags-for-emergency-response/
But I implore you; use any influence to humanize Google,
especially “Social Google”.
I may never be as tech smart as their least employee,
but the public-facing evidence of a lack humans in Mountain View is stunning.
And please, please don’t try to be Twitter.
We have and love Twitter. Add an entire different,
wonderful advancement to the human-based web.
Thank you.
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