Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Google Buzz, Chat and Reader - together at last. Farewell Twitter.

Buzz is up, though at the moment it's sluggish and it looks like Googel IM/SMS may have cratered along with it. Probably being hammered.

The Buzz site says it's being rolled out gradually, but I clicked the sign up button there and it seemed to add it to my Gmail. It looks like my Buzz followers include my Google Reader shared item followers (I'm following 43 people and 22 people are following me) plus my Chat correspondents.

The Buzz shared items are the sum of Chat status messages, Google reader shared items and Picasa image shares:
Your Google Reader shared items, Picasa Web public albums, and Google Chat status messages will automatically appear as posts in Buzz. To edit your connected sites or change privacy settings, view connected sites.
"Connected sites" create posts in Buzz. Mine started out with Picasa public albums and Google Reader shared items. It's not, however, showing my Chat status messages as a "connected site" so there's something funny there. Those should really show as "connected sites". [I don't think Chat updates are doing anything at the moment].

I think that Buzz is the gathering point and Buzz posts don't go to Google Reader shared items or to Chat status, but really it's hard to tell. The site is semi-stable at the moment.

I've never had much use for Twitter, and it looks like I'll have even less use in the future - especially if Google ties this into SMS.

PS. Viewing the people I follow, I see that my "leonine" OS X 10.6 user account icon has now metastasized to be attached in Gmail's Buzz follower view to my corporate email. Where will it go next?

Update: I reviewed how these display in my Google Profile, and I decided it was a bit too much information to have publicly available there. My Google Profile is very discoverable, hence corporate. So I removed the connectivity to Reader Shared items. I'll explore this over time.

Update 2: I wonder if Google will even try to submit an iPhone Buzz app, given that Apple would almost certainly reject it.

See also:

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