Google Buzz – First Impressions & Five Questions

 I got into Google Buzz today and spent a couple of hours playing with it.   I'm going to continue to work with it – and see how it develops – but so far I'm a little underwhelmed.  Check out my profile if you wanna?

First, if you haven't played with it yet – and you want to – you don't necessarily need to wait for it to show up in your Gmail.  You can force it in (at least I was able to), by going to buzz.google.com – clicking on the "try it in Gmail" button – and then logging into your Gmail account.   BUT there's an important exception here – which brings up a really weird behavior (I won't go so far as to call it a bug) in Google's account management.

If you're a Google Apps customer and that's whats attached to your Google Account Profile, it doesn't recognize that you have Gmail account.   And it will tell you (as it told me) that you have to create a Gmail account in order to activate Buzz.  No matter which way i went in – it wouldn't see my Google Apps mail as a Gmail account.  My guess is that it's because it wants to associate you with a Username and that name has to be unique – so they're using your Gmail username as that unique identifier.  Still, it would have been great to be able to "pick" an Account name only.

Anyway, no big schmig… I set up a new Gmail Account – and imported my contacts – hoping for a discovery process for Friends/Followers.  No such luck.  At this point, it's all onesies and twosies where you have to pick your followers/friends and then follow them manually.   This just won't fly long-term and I'm definitely NOT going to try and proactively rebuild my social network on this platform at this point. 

The interface is nice and it's super-nice that it's integrated into Gmail.

I also liked that it curates your stream a little for you – hiding posts from folks with lesser activity.  At the bottom of the stream, you've got the ability to expand that.

So, compared to Friendfeed it really feels much cleaner.  You can connect other services to appear in Google Buzz – like Twitter, and your Blog – but you can't publish out to them through Buzz.  Interestingly there seems to be quite a bit of lag for the posts coming in from the other services.

The deal-breaker for me though is the inability to find my friends/followers on the other services.  No connection to my Twitter followers or Facebook Friends (unlike Friendfeed).  I'll assume that these features are coming – otherwise, I'm not sure I'll be interested to use Buzz all that often.  

It's early though – so we'll see what happens.   Here are my top five questions so far:

1. Friendfeatures or TwitterKiller or InYourFacebook?
So, if you're a Friendfeed user – Buzz is going to be very familiar to you. You get more than 140 characters, you can insert pictures – and there are comments to post just like in Friendfeed.  But, really it's Twitter and Facebook that this will ultimately be compared against – so the question will become – what does Google really want to do with Buzz?   Twitter certainly doesn't have the features that Google Buzz does – but that simplicity makes it really attractive to non-technical people.   For example, do you really see celebrities getting into Google Buzz? 

2. Who's Following Who?
So, a big question will be if Google starts to curate people using some sort of "Page Rank" like they do with Web pages.  On Twitter, the onus is really on you to find interesting people based on their content stream and then follow them.  Reputation gathering is an art (at best) at this point.   Google, on the other hand, has a history and an aptitude for trying to automate this algorithmically.  If they can make that work – and start to promote "status" using Google – this is going to open up a whole new kind of SEO – or BO (Buzz Optimization). 

3. If you don't follow me… follow the money
When are the ads coming?   You know they are – and you know they'll be within the updates.  or, will they find some new screen real estate. There are small web clips up at the top – but if Adwords are coming – is Adsense also coming to Google Buzz?

4. Is Buzz really meant for mobile?
Maybe Buzz is really meant for mobile platforms.  Already folks are loving the mobile interfaces – and drooling over what they're sure will be an amazing Android application.    Also the local "check-in" function (e.g. 4Square features) aren't quite there yet – but they'll get better and better.

5. How much time am *I* really going to invest in this right away
So, I've really been burned before by really getting into some Google Products only to see them wither on the vine…  Yeah, I'm talkin to you Google Base…. So – is this going to really take off, or will it just simply languish there for tech folk.

It's early (heck its in it's first week) so there's lots to look at and wait for.   Would love to hear your thoughts on Google Buzz as well.