So Google Buzz launched today, and it breaks two important rules:
Rule One: Critical Mass Is Job #1.
The legitimate way for social software to reach critical mass is for the software to be useful even if all your friends aren’t on it. It also helps if the software has a seed group of influential and passionate users.
Google tries to cheat by merging Buzz into Gmail. The result is a confusing mess. Is Buzz its own product? When you use it on an iPhone, it is. In a desktop browser it’s like a secondary Gmail inbox. Either way, my Gmail “contacts” are not the same people I’d want to follow on Facebook or Twitter. The expectations around email are totally different than those around social networking software.
Rule Two: The user’s mental model of social software must be crystal clear, especially where privacy is on the line.
This is something Facebook screws up constantly. It seems every few months they change how the software and privacy settings work. They only get away with this because they already have critical mass.
Twitter does a great job of making the mental model clear. Your account is very public by default, and optionally very private. The rules are simple so you know where you stand.
Google Buzz makes a mess of things. Is it a geotagging service? A Gmail plugin? A Twitter clone? When people pull in their Twitter or Flickr posts, do my replies only exist inside Buzz?
Regarding privacy: Who can see my updates? Is there a “friends only” setting? Why are some of these people my “friends” when they’re really just email contacts? How do I know what’s public and private in Gmail now?
It drives me crazy when services makes assumptions about me by scraping my email account. How many ex-clients, ex-employers, and ex-spouses are in there that we don’t want to be reminded of?
There’s more to privacy than personal data leaks. Social software should also protect us from icky feelings and forced, awkward decisions like “do I really want to allow this jerk from high school to be my fake internet friend?”
And finally, my big complaint with Buzz is that there’s no off button as far as I can tell. You can remove it from Gmail, but you’ll still have an active Buzz account. The only way to really opt out is to delete your Google Profile, but I don’t want to do that, especially since it’s not clear if doing so will break my ability to use my profile URL for OpenID authentication.
Google is just not good at building compelling social software. Expect more of these hamfisted “hey let’s bolt our lame social stuff onto our good products!” moves
Update: Excellent posts on Buzz and Google’s general mishandling of social media by Kontra, here, here, and here.