- Social networking, micro-blogging, messaging tool.
- Was integrated into Gmail.
- Let users share - links, photos, videos, status messages, comments - organized in "conversations" and visible in the user's inbox.
- Enabled users to choose to share publicly with the world; or privately to a group of friends; each time they posted.
- Picasa, Flickr, Google Latitude, Google Reader, Google Sidewiki, YouTube, Blogger, FriendFeed, identi.ca, Twitter were integrated.
- Superseded by Google+
- Was seen as an attempt to compete with Facebook, Twitter.
What was its timeline?
- Launched in Feb 2010
- Discontinued in Dec 2011
- Lived for 22 months
Why did it fail?
- It sneaked up on users - It was automatically added to Gmail, as an opt-out service that sneakily appeared as a folder in the comfy old Inbox without warning.
- Google didn't really launch it - As just mentioned, it just suddenly appeared as part of Gmail without much introduction or explanation. This confused people, they didn't know what to make of it or how it worked.
- If compared with Twitter, there wasn’t any major improvement over Twitter. In fact, its interface was more crowded, & didn’t have a character limit.
- People had no reason to move from Twitter to Buzz.
- Had a severe privacy flaw - By default Buzz publicly disclosed (on the user's Google profile) a list of the names of Gmail contacts that the user has most frequently emailed or chatted with. Users who failed to disable this feature (or did not realize that they had to) could have sensitive information about themselves and their contacts revealed.
- Mobile version of Buzz, by default, published the user's exact location when they posted a message to the service.
- Buzz initially created users' social graphs from their gmail address books - But, not every problem can be solved with an algorithm - The social graphs must always be user-generated.
- The Buzz team did not understand the ramifications of putting something untrusted into a trusted application. For most mainstream users, email is an extremely trusted application. They know how it works, they know when they send an email to someone that it doesn't go to someone else, and they know that unless they give their password out, that others else can't read their private messages. When Buzz launched, people no longer knew how their trusted email program worked. They heard rumors of other people's content being inappropriately displayed and they had no way of knowing whether their personal emails were being displayed to other people. In short, Google broke the trusted environment that the users had in Gmail.
- The Buzz team did not understand how users interact with their social groups. Most user don't want the content their families post to them to be visible to their friends, or to their work colleagues. Users don't want their weekend sh!tty-stuff to be shown to their work colleagues or to their families. They want their social groups and the content that originated from individual groups to be sandboxed. But, when Buzz launched, it inappropriately assumed that you were friends with everyone you email. Not only are you usually not friends with everyone you email, but you're "friends" with these people in every-possible-way. Summary is that often you don't want your social groups to cross-pollinate - But Buzz made an inappropriate assumptions on how people express themselves across social groups and became creepy in the process.
- Buzz; just like Facebook/Twitter; would always have a lot going on it - How wold have Google expected to fit all of it into an email tab?
- The battle for the social graph had already been won by Facebook (reciprocal social graph) and Twitter (non-reciprocal social graph).
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