`Google Buzz? More Like Buzz Kill' : Team Whiner

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by kg13 February 10, 2010

`Google Buzz? More Like Buzz Kill'

From Daniel Lyons at Newsweek:

And now, ta-da, comes Google Buzz, announced yesterday, and I swear to God I just want to start screaming. What is it? Apparently it is Gmail on steroids. Basically, Google has copied stuff that people do on Facebook and Twitter and added them to Gmail, so that now my e-mail can become another place where I can network socially with my social network of people I don’t really even know. I can (but won’t) share pictures and status updates with people in my Gmail contacts list, and they can (and, sadly, will, unless I can prevent them) start doing the same to me. Google’s promo video, complete with the requisite cutesy drawings and happy music and groovy-guy voice-over, was intended to make it all sound perfectly simple but instead had me reaching for the Xanax. Good grief.

Why, Google? Why take a perfectly wonderful e-mail system and pollute it by adding a zillion new things to it? I’m not looking for more clutter in my life. I’m looking for less. At the launch event some Google exec claimed Buzz is a way to “find the signal in the social networking noise,” but to me it looks like Google is just adding to the noise.

Why does Buzz even exist? Is it because Google wants to make my life better in some way? No. Buzz exists because Google feels threatened by Twitter and Facebook and wants to kill them. Google has become what Microsoft used to be—the Borg, the company that gobbles up ideas from smaller rivals and cranks out lame imitations in an attempt to put the little guys out of business.

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