pavyedav | boredom and inherent curiosity, in one

It was reported a few days ago that Google Buzz is going to be discontinued, and frankly I couldn’t be happier. I barely ever used Buzz, and I am one of those people who finds messages in an unread inbox (you know, the boldface and the number in parens) extremely irritating, so I literally used to click on Buzz and click back just so that the left side of my Gmail would be clear and free.

So, Buzz, good riddance. It was one of the worst services Google introduced, and it had very little traction from its inception. It wasn’t as disastrous as Wave, but it still did not have the momentum that Google was hoping for.

However, to be fair, the concept of Buzz actually had promise. What’s surprising is that Google, usually a pinnacle of timely execution, did not envision correctly how Buzz could be used or what consumers found easy and user-friendly. The idea to use Gmail’s large and loyal userbase was unquestionably a good way to go, and the desire to take advantage of the buzz (pun very much intended) of Twitter and Facebook status updates also had extreme potential. 

But when Buzz was born, it was pretty clear it wasn’t done correctly. In retrospect, if those who worked on Buzz had imagined some of the things that Google+ currently has, such as having a status update immediately accessible on the Gmail inbox page, then I could have seen it used more. Entering and looking at status updates just seemed very clunky and disorganized. Also, if Google really wanted to mimic Facebook and Twitter’s core ideas, then I feel like they should have made the entire Gmail inbox home page chock full of items (just like Facebook: a platform), where we could see our own inbox, others’ statuses, and an easy bar to update your own status. Buzz had none of these, so it didn’t gain a good footing. Pretty expected.

Anyway, those are some of the inconveniences I saw with Buzz, some of which actually still seem to be inconveniences in Google+. That Google employee who ranted about Google+ and its company’s inability to make “platforms out of its products” is absolutely true. Will Google start renovating G+?