I tried it for a week. I had about 8 other friends who used it. I hate it. It was poorly conceived, poorly executed, poorly explained, and was a gigantic privacy intrusion. It’s also friggin’ impossible to opt out of, but I managed to do it with a little help from CNET:
**Pro: **It’s Facebook, but without the dozens of people I’m not really friends with. It takes Facebook’s casual “here’s what’s on my mind” format and distributes it to those who I actually communicate with.
**Con: **Not really, since it pulls people from my contact list who I may not have had a conversation with in 2 years, including ex-girlfriends and other assorted n’er do wells.
**Pro: **It’s Twitter, but with the ability to communicate in chunks larger than 140 characters.
**Con: **Except not really, since I don’t get to follow the interesting news sites and niche-experts I do on Twitter. Plus, I don’t do any communicating on Twitter - it’s a news source for me.
**Pro: **It’s Google Wave, minus (quite) a few features, but accessible via IE (which I’m tied to at work).
**Con: **Not really, since the features it’s missing are important, and it’s being broadcast to your entire Buzz network.
Again, here’s a link to a CNET article detailing how to completely opt out of Google Buzz.
The whole thing is very nebulous. I consider myself computer and Internet savvy, but I don’t know what the hell Buzz is for. Something about keeping in touch. So you keep in touch, while in Gmail sends/receives e-mail, has mobile SMS capabilities and real-time chat capabilities? Now there’s a 4th way to communicate? And for some reason Google thought it would be a good idea to share all your contacts with your BuzzFriends?
The various settings are spread out and hard to find as well.
I’m assuming since I only have one Buzz friend who I trust and don’t care if they see my contacts, and that I’ve never created a Google Profile that I should be safe from other people sniffing my contacts list.
I read (or watched) a tiny bit about Buzz when it first was launched and was thoroughly unimpressed. It doesn’t do anything that a moron couldn’t figure out how to do on Facebook. If you want to send your tweets to FB, you can. If you want to link to your Flickr and YouTube stuff on FB, you can. If you want to find your friends on FB, you can.
I’m not all “Facebook is the shit and Google is a big poser and can go to hell!” I could care less which company’s servers I get a free ride from. However, I went through the Friendster->MySpace shift, and the MySpace->Facebook shift and I’m not one for enjoying moving my stuff all over the internets. If all of my friends up and move to Buzz then I guess that’s where I’m going to go. But I don’t see it happening, and I’m surely not going to be the first one to do it.