Buzz default: hijack

Unsure of its ability to successfully roll it out as an independent product, Google must have then decided to force feed Buzz through its Gmail user base of 175 million. Google executives likely reckoned that in a single day Buzz would garner more users than Twitter has been able to in two years after all that celebrity publicity. That really is why Gmail users woke up one day to find their private account details exposed to the public, unannounced and unprepared, because without such default exposure Google executives likely didn’t believe they could deliver a critical user base for Buzz. That’s not “improper testing,” it’s a platform strategy. And the fact that Google reacted quickly to public pressure doesn’t negate the fact that its arrogance was thoroughly exposed. The correction isn’t significant, the exposed intentions are.

-Counternotions, Buzzback

Bingo.

Burberry, eh?

Burberry’s much-vaunted British appeal is a similarly tricky concept. Of course, as Bailey puts it, “Britishness is not about a red bus, a red postbox, and a bobby – these are such cliched things. It’s an attitude. For me, it’s about this constant clashing of the very formal with the rebellious, the innovation. We’re all on this little island – and you’ve got these two opposing fields. You’ve got the people who think very big, hypothetically – artists, designers, creatives – we have the most creative nation, I believe, in the world. But then we also have this incredibly moralistic, ‘we have to uphold society’ [idea]. When those two worlds collide – for me, that’s what Britishness is about. But you can’t put that into a box. It’s not tangible.”

-Chrisopher Bailey, Burberry CCO, on Britishness

This could have been spoken by a Canadian. We all live with a story that defines us and we rebel against.

Bloggercide

From last year: “…rather than totally deleting the posts as before, the posts are switched to draft mode, which allows the blogger to see the post and change it (if necessary).”

From yesterday: “These sites, hosted by Google’s Blogger and Blogspot services, received notices only after their sites – and years of archives – were wiped from the internet.”

Google isn’t evil. They’re just amoral, as most platform owners become.

Google Buzz is the mushy middle

I use Facebook to interact with people I know privately.

I use Twitter to follow people I find interesting to filter the world.

What will I use Google Buzz for?

Mail is a subset of groups from Facebook and Twitter. I use it to correspond with people I do know and people I barely know. How do I align this in my head? Am I really going to share vacation pictures here? Or find great thinkers to follow?

Neither. Google is in the mushy middle with this. They’ve made the engineer’s mistake of adding features that can be added—but shouldn’t. And they’ve made the MBA’s mistake of talking themselves into an existing market rather than opening a new one.

Google Buzz is to Gmail what AIM pages were to AIM. An attempt to bolt new features onto a legacy system. Won’t happen.

The news to watch in email and communication is Facebook Titan. Aside from a full email client, providing a Facebook email proxy for your address is killer.