Google Buzz has arrived, but will it win Google’s place in the social web?

Not yet.

In fact, all the buzz about Google Buzz has been decidedly negative, and a large deal of it boils down to Buzz’s integration with GMail.  I’m inclined to agree.

After a few days of using Buzz, I’m already “blanking” the little number in GMail that tells me how many Buzz alerts I have to read.  You could argue that email is the most social application out there, so integrating Buzz with Gmail should be a good move.  And yet, it doesn’t quite work.

So what’s gone wrong? Here’s the word on the street from a few critics:

Too Much Noise

VC Fred Wilson:

[The number shown in my Buzz feed] is one of my big issues with Buzz. That (42) number includes replies to buzzes (can I call them tweets?) that the people I am following leave. Buzz copies the FriendFeed user experience for the most part. And as much as I admire FriendFeed and the people who built it, I don’t believe that is a compelling experience for the mainstream user.

When I follow Pete Cashmore in Buzz, I’m basically following all of his fans. And my Buzz timeline is filled with all of their replies to his posts. I think that user experience works well in something like this blog and the comments. I don’t think it works well in a mass medium where I want to follow hundreds of people.

Poor Links with Facebook and Twitter

Chris O’Brien of SiliconBeat:

On Google Buzz, I can pull in tweets, but can’t publish them out. And there’s no ability to link my Facebook account. Those are both big flaws in my view. If I’m going to build a new social network on someone else’s platform, I want it to work well with the others I’ve already created.

As it stands now, I can’t integrate these networks as much as I’d like. So I have to choose between them. And of course Google Buzz will stay way back in the back.

Facebook Is Still Better

Mashable argues that Facebook still trumps Google Buzz because Buzz doesn’t incentivise people to leave their existing social networks:

I predicted at the end of last year that Facebook is well-poised to try to pry web dominance away from Google in 2010. Buzz doesn’t change my mind. Facebook is threatening Google, but Google isn’t threatening Facebook because it doesn’t offer any features so great that they incentivize people to leave behind their existing networks or spend their time updating and following yet another one when their friends are already all on Facebook or Twitter.

Facebook now dominates the social web so completely that it’s difficult to imagine an exodus to a competing service, unless that service offered some revolutionary new features that Facebook couldn’t possibly match — Buzz doesn’t.

Reading updates feels like an obligation

Here’s an interesting point from Alan Hogan, who’s post is currently one of the top bookmarks in delicious’ popular bookmarks.  He argues that putting Buzz in Google Mail doesn’t make sense because the two are different tools with different priorities:

Since Buzz is a direct competitor to Twitter, Buzz updates are theoretically low-value, non-critical, skimmable, and okay to completely ignore. Adding an unread count encourages users to catch up on Buzz items as soon as one or more new ones are available. All of the above “features” interrupt workflow, fragment skimming sessions, and ruin the low-intensity “skim, read, and briefly respond” experience.

No one is arguing that Google is doing the right thing by going hard at the social Web.  Hard as they may try, they’ve still got a ways to go.  I’ll know it works when the rest of my network abandons everything else for Buzz.  Until then, it’s back to Twitter and Facebook for me.

Are you playing with Google Buzz?  Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Last September, Google announced “Sidewiki”, a feature of Firefox and IE that allows anyone to contribute “helpful” information next to any webpage. The latest buzz around Sidewiki concerns Reframe It, a start-up company which recently claimed that Sidewiki emulates Reframe It’s own web annotation software, right down to the icons.

Although it’s unlikely that Reframe It will sue Google (its own CEO Bobby Fishkin said himself that his team “doesn’t need the distraction”), the news points to the increasingly competitive nature of web annotation.  And the entry of Google’s SideWiki completely changes the game.

Unlike other companies, Google offers an API for Sidewiki which gives developers the ability to access comments for their own sites. And once SideWiki is integrated with Google’s Chrome Web browser, it will become visible to a relatively large audience of users. Pair that with integration into existing technologies like GMail, Google will have done something extraordinary: it will have turned the web into its own social network. And the impact for anyone who runs a website, particularly corporations, is far reaching.

Jeremiah Owyang recently wrote how Sidewiki shifts control over corporate websites to the consumer:

Every webpage on your corporate website, intranet, and extranet are now social. Anyone who accesses these features can now rely on their friends or those who contribute to get additional information. Competitors can link to their competing product, consumers can rate or discuss the positive and negative experiences with your company or product.

Mark Borkowski added to this in yesterday’s Guardian:

In time, this tool will significantly change the way brands strategise, think and exist. SideWiki is going to challenge PR by providing the masses with the tool for the ultimate expression of people power, something uncontainable that will need constant monitoring.

The implications are a little scary, and Reframe It isn’t the only company in a huff. Marketer Sylvie Fortin fumes “Goo­gle not only enjoys 90% mar­ket share of all search engine traf­fic but also they now con­trol over 90% of YOUR cus­to­mers, YOUR traf­fic, YOUR ad space, and YOUR money.” And we can’t help but wonder how Google will use the data it gathers from these comments.

But I would argue that it’s better to stop worrying and start strategizing. There’s no avoiding the future of the social web, and Sidewiki is just more evidence that companies had better start developing a social strategy now. As Borkowski puts it, “SideWiki is a seminal moment”:

Ad agencies once proactively shaped vision but now PR is demonstrably just as capable at understanding and cultivating future thinking, if not more so. PR has always engaged in a two-way conversation and should be capitalising on this to earn its clients’ trust. SideWiki is a call to arms – there is no excuse for complacency, as failure in today’s landscape is public, searchable and enduring.

Read more:

• Google’s SideWiki Shifts Power to Consumers – Away from Corporate Websites [Jeremiah Owyang]
• SideWiki changes everything [The Guardian]
• Did Google Steal Sidewiki From a Startup? [ReadWriteWeb]

French anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss died last week at age 100. Mr. Levi-Strauss, a central figure in the structuralist school of thought, changed the way we understand civilization.

Until the 20th century, people generally believed that there were “savage” people and there were “civilized” people and the two societies were essentially distinct. Mr. Levi-Strauss showed that there was no fundamental difference between the belief systems of “primitive” races and those of modern societies. In fact, basic structures of myth and thought guide all of us.

“Our sciences first became isolated in order to become deeper, but at a certain depth, they succeed in joining each other. Thus, little by little, in an objective area, the old philosophical hypothesis…of the universal existence of a human nature is borne out.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss, 100, Dies; Altered Western Views of the ‘Primitive’ [New York Times]
Claude Lévi-Strauss: The View From Afar [UNESCO]