Question
Why are tech-bloggers so bent on discrediting Google Buzz, while overlooking bigger social flops like Apple's Ping?
Answer
The criticism is completely justified, and the comparison with things like Ping is meaningless.
One simple reason: "social" is central to the future of Google according to its own visions, and Buzz was launched with expectations that it would compete with Twitter.
The expectations were unreasonable in my opinion, since up-selling a social feature to GMail users is actually as hard as starting a new social service from scratch. Possibly harder. People mistakenly assumed that Google having access to zillions of mailboxes should work as an advantage. Google did nothing to change or challenge those expectations (they encouraged it a bit actually), so there is no point whining about it now.
But even with the handicap of unreasonable expectations, Buzz went on to make things worse for itself than they needed to be. And not just the initial privacy-settings fiasco.
The whole basic model of what I call pseudo-social activity. I was nominally "on" Buzz and the thing seemed to keep up a facade of activity that was basically an impoverished, distracting and fragmenting repackaging of what I was already seeing on Twitter. I gave up on it for the same reason I gave up on Friendfeed. The aggregation simply does not add enough value, and subtracts a lot.
There is no social reason to be on Buzz. The people who self-select randomly into using Buzz as their primary home in my social graph neighborhood have nothing in common. With Twitter and Facebook, I know to expect a certain kind of friend/contact to appear on those networks. They both have a social identity. Buzz? None.
Google Reader as a social hub is at least more meaningful. I find a specific kind of person using the news item sharing feature on Reader, so I pay attention to the social bit there.
In short, a social service without a coherent, developing social identity is not a social service at all. From a social-filtering perspective, if the filter does not have an identity, I don't know what kind of information will percolate through it. I cannot design my information consumption life around it in a reliable way.
I am willing to forgive and be patient with services that take time to develop a social "filter" identity, but I have no patience for geeky products that don't even make an attempt to catalyze one, or realize that they need one.
One simple reason: "social" is central to the future of Google according to its own visions, and Buzz was launched with expectations that it would compete with Twitter.
The expectations were unreasonable in my opinion, since up-selling a social feature to GMail users is actually as hard as starting a new social service from scratch. Possibly harder. People mistakenly assumed that Google having access to zillions of mailboxes should work as an advantage. Google did nothing to change or challenge those expectations (they encouraged it a bit actually), so there is no point whining about it now.
But even with the handicap of unreasonable expectations, Buzz went on to make things worse for itself than they needed to be. And not just the initial privacy-settings fiasco.
The whole basic model of what I call pseudo-social activity. I was nominally "on" Buzz and the thing seemed to keep up a facade of activity that was basically an impoverished, distracting and fragmenting repackaging of what I was already seeing on Twitter. I gave up on it for the same reason I gave up on Friendfeed. The aggregation simply does not add enough value, and subtracts a lot.
There is no social reason to be on Buzz. The people who self-select randomly into using Buzz as their primary home in my social graph neighborhood have nothing in common. With Twitter and Facebook, I know to expect a certain kind of friend/contact to appear on those networks. They both have a social identity. Buzz? None.
Google Reader as a social hub is at least more meaningful. I find a specific kind of person using the news item sharing feature on Reader, so I pay attention to the social bit there.
In short, a social service without a coherent, developing social identity is not a social service at all. From a social-filtering perspective, if the filter does not have an identity, I don't know what kind of information will percolate through it. I cannot design my information consumption life around it in a reliable way.
I am willing to forgive and be patient with services that take time to develop a social "filter" identity, but I have no patience for geeky products that don't even make an attempt to catalyze one, or realize that they need one.