Monday, February 15, 2010

Google Buzz Should Be Google Mana: "What Is It?"

Last week while I was snowed in, Google rolled out their new service, Buzz. I immediately enabled it and have been trying to figure out the point ever since.

At one point, I told Christina they should call it "Mana", because people look at it and ask "What is it?" For those of you who are not studied in the exodus, that's what mana means: "What is it?"

I think Buzz has a lot of promise, if I can figure out the point. What is it supposed to be? Is it a social network? Is it an aggregator? I don't know. 

Twitter was very easy to figure out. Twitter's heuristic (that is design philosophy) was "In 140 characters or less, what are you doing right now?" That's really easy to figure out and people found some very creative ways to use Twitter before the "Social Media/Web 2.0 Consultants" showed up.

To this point, I've centered my personal social media strategy around Twitter. I run almost everything through Twitter (you can follow me here.) Most other social networks (including Buzz) can pick up your Twitter feed. Mine goes to Facebook, LinkedIn, and now Buzz. I'm sure it goes to a few other places, but I've forgotten then.

Twitter is a nice place to get your thoughts out there, but discussing them on Twitter is a little cumbersome. I tend to discuss things on Facebook, which allows commenting on posts. I also have a lot of online friends who aren't on Twitter, but are on Facebook, so I interact with them on Facebook.

This has a little confusion. People on Facebook don't seem to understand the Retweet function, so I'll retweet somebody else's comment and people on Facebook think it's my original thought, even if it includes the via @otherperson that Twitterific adds. 

My Twitter feed gets automatically scooped to Buzz, which is good. I wonder why Buzz doesn't interact with Facebook.

Are you using Buzz? What do you think about it? 

No comments: