CES 2011 is just around the corner and in a rare bit of intelligent marketing Motorola is showing off what appears to be a new tablet, probably called something like “Buzz,” judging by the clever bee flitting around at the end. → Read More
Google is weird. I mean seriously weird. Or maybe it’s just Google Buzz.
With all the Facebook privacy issues going on right now I thought I’d go and check out Google Buzz. I’d heard a rumour you couldn’t delete your profile. On the face of it, it would appear you can. At the bottom of the Edit Profile page, there is a link to deleting your Buzz profile which says “This will disable Google Buzz integration in Gmail and delete your Google profile and Buzz posts. It will also disconnect any connected sites and unfollow you from anyone you are following.”
Fine, that’s good enough for me. It may well be that Google retains data whether I know it or not. I pretty much assume Google keeps everything. That’s not what caught my eye.
What got my attention were the other profiles Google was “suggesting” I add to mine. → Read More
When Google announced its big jump into the social stream with the launch of Google Buzz back in February, the company thought it was doing everyone a favor by having users auto-follow the people they emailed and chatted the most with. That was a mistake, and the heat was turned on quickly by the broad press, vocal users and privacy pundits.
Two days after launching (prematurely), Google tweaked the product to make it clearer for new users what was going on behind the scenes when they click the ‘Buzz’ tab, and they made even more changes two days later.
But those changes only affected new users, and not the – reportedly – millions of people who gave it a whirl in the first four days after launch. Later today, Google will start prompting all existing users to review their existing privacy settings upon launching the service. → Read More
They did say that the company was working on “big stuff” but we didn’t think it would be this big. Buzz is after all everyone’s favorite social networking communication sharing thing they don’t understand. BuzzPeek is dead easy to use. There’s no setup required — just turn it on and you’ll automatically be opted in to everything. BuzzPeek works anywhere around the world (except Mainland China) and it’s always, always on so you’ll never miss a thing. Just like the iPad there’s no keyboard, but unlike tablet PCs the battery life is a full 17 days (based on average of 2 messages per day). And for power users there’s a native upgrade path to Wave. I want one but wouldn’t know what to do with it just like Buzz. → Read More
An interesting firefight broke out over the weekend as Google engineer DeWitt Clinton defended Google data policies in Buzz and related “open” standards. Those who remember the politics of RSS and the games companies played around its buildout would recognize a number of the names and tactics of the current positioning. Closed comment threads, insinuations, calls to action — only the names of the bigcos are shifting, and not all that much either. The latest wrinkle is to describe developer acceptance as the key measurement of open standards. As Clinton and fellow Google evangelists fan out across the realtime stream’s version of the Sunday talk shows, they’re having to argue the borginess of Facebook versus Google. C’mon guys, get serious. Google has the gorilla crown going away. Think of the breadth and depth of Google’s strategy: own every product category and decorate each with their own metadata. Gmail, done. Apps, done enough. Chrome. OS, Android, Nexus. Now Buzz. What folks who argue against the Google tax don’t understand is that this isn’t going to happen if…. It’s done, banked, in the books, check cashed, burger eaten. Every time a Buzz gets distributed, the addition of key voices from this and previous eras solidifies the new metadata type as the social graph ripples spread. It doesn’t matter how immature Buzz is compared to other systems; in fact, it just makes the resultant Buzzes on the subject all the more canonical. No matter how long it takes for these systems to converge, each object will have its own metadata stamp. From here on out, Buzz stamps are getting licked and posted in increasingly significant numbers. The big companies behind these moves have learned a lot from the pioneers of RSS and open source, as well as the bigco strategies of Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle/Sun. But Google has taken all the previous strategies and combined them into one relentless juggernaut: create the data and let the process fall into place around it. It would be cynical to suggest that Google was somehow behind the open standards players who started the ball rolling, but clearly the two groups scratched each other’s backs along the way. Perhaps the key melting pot for this buildout was the Internet Identity Workshop, where key players from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook first got together openly. Facebook seems to have the most to gain by adoption of the various open → Read More
If there’s anyone who has the inside track on Buzz and all things social media related, it’s TechCrunch super-reporter MG Siegler. He’s waited two weeks to weigh in on Buzz good bad and ugly, and it turns out that Buzz is FriendFeed — or will be. In the interests of setting the record straight, let me set the record straight. 1. Buzz is not FriendFeed. If it were, it would be being used by a vanishingly small minority of social media experts who have no life. Instead, it is being used by millions of privacy-invaded geniuses who apparently either have had the intelligence to understand that they get what they click for (understanding the meaning of Yes, I’m clicking here for a service I am being offered for free) or are just hopelessly trapped in a bigco system where they have no rights and can only just keep clicking in hopes of finding the way out. 2. If Buzz is going to become FriendFeed, only with real friends, then Google has some secret ability to turn an overly complex non-viral site into a massive multiplayer gaming system disguised as an extension to email. Wait, we call that Brizzly. Failing the secret stuff, just following the playbook already laid out in detail by FriendFeed seems guaranteed to produce a community of Scoble hiders, er, muters, at such massive scale that it will take more (hu)man-years of work than went into building all the useless Twitter lists. 3. Buzz is not FriendFeed because project manager Buzz Jackson denies ever looking at FriendFeed because Google is busy getting feedback from users who didn’t know the product existed until 2 weeks ago. That leaves internal testing, which if you accept the premise that small is ugly and huge is beautiful would mandate ignoring the most sophisticated testing suite so far, namely FriendFeed. Of course, it’s total bullshit that Buzz hasn’t looked at FriendFeed. Just not enough, according to MG. 4. This small is ugly theory of disruption suggests that only massive organisms can effect change. Like the iPhone for example, which was such a resource-hungry project that Apple had to slow down the release of the next version of OS/X to build the iPhone OS out. Or that Google had to invest in a browser, an OS, and a cloud app suite in order to catch up and present an alternative that in turn → Read More
Salesforce CEO and Chairman Marc Benioff unveiled the company’s realtime micromessaging technology as it went into a private beta with 100 customers. The press event featured a rather unique sketch of the company’s vision of the near future of enterprise realtime by Benioff, followed by several quick demos of the product’s capabilities as leveraged by several partners. Interestingly, Benioff’s meta view of what he called Cloud 2 and what we call realtime seemed almost a reverie in contrast to the demos, which illustrated in a few short dives into the Salesforce architecture how deeply Chatter is already embedded in the platform. The messaging around this new Collaboration platform was if anything underplayed next to the reality, that Chatter completely transforms the business process layer. Salesforce already has decoupled rapid development and deployment from the exigencies of hardware and on-premise software management. Now, with Chatter, customers and developers (read partners) can bootstrap new realtime techniques that take advantage of the flattening of business heirarchies and the tendency for small businesses and startups to distribute work around a fluid workforce where key players wear multiple hats. It seems almost too simple an insight, that the speed with which Salesforce is innovating is exponentially growing with each new layer of its stack. The so-called collaboration layer launched today is potentially far more than just a competitor to Sharepoint and Lotus Notes, but also the harbinger of new application strategies that may launch new businesses out of their own realtime designs and problem-solving. In conversation later with Benioff, it’s clear that he sees Salesforce in a strong position to not just compete, but move up and out of the SFA beginnings of the company and into a period of rapid growth. With Google talking aggressively about moving Buzz to the enterprise, the question for customers is how long they can afford to wait for the search giant to catch up to what Benioff already is deploying. Benioff’s job is to pay close attention to Google’s strategy of using Buzz to drive ubiquity around various emerging open formats and consensus around the value of such consumer data as supportive of enterprise business process flows. He also has to rapidly add Android to his iPhone and Blackberry clients. I came out of today’s low key messaging with a much greater sense of the speed with which Salesforce is putting the foot to the pedal. Letting the → Read More
Well, lookee here, it’s Google with a FriendFeed clone just in time to ask the musical question: If FriendFeed sucks so much, why on earth is Google doing a for-profit version of it? While the privacy crisis rages on around our inboxes, Google has blasted yet another microstream out into direct symbiosis with Twitter. Yes, that is exactly what FriendFeed did back in the days it was just an aggregator. Later came the realtime chat, and then Wave, and then Google Realtime Search, all with that annoying realtime updating of the stream that caused so many of us to run for the Easy Hills. This stuff is so hard to understand that we’ve endured months of explanation by Facebook, a buy out of FriendFeed to silence the disturbing noise, and of course Twitter lists. How many times did we think about lists this week, except to note that there are not any in Buzz. It’s been 4 or 5 days now, and even though Google PR has earned its keep managing the privacy missteps, we haven’t heard apologies from the CEO or founders like Zuckerberg pumped out around Beacon and whatever the next stumble was. What’s weird is I can’t remember much more than some Terms of Service that had to be rolled back. It may seem unfair, but Google has waited long enough to benefit from user fatigue about any of these issues. Actually, I can’t remember why we care about this at all. It mystifies me that Marc Benioff is investing Salesforce cycles in this social stream, or why Buzz will be followed as soon as possible with an enterprise version. Looking at the Buzz flow, the only useful stuff is about Buzz futures; at some point all the FriendFeed features will be reimplemented and then the conversation will atrophy and move to a professional advertising QVC channel model. You’ll know the resulting content will be professionally produced because the rest of us will be sick of the whole thing. My favorite part was the Google program manager’s response to a question about the return of Track (we’re always looking for good ideas, whatever that Track thing might be). Buzz really doesn’t need Track at all because there is absolutely no rational architecture to add value to. Basing a social graph on email is like Adobe supporting HTML5. Or trying to decipher which parts of this article are → Read More
Hello! Always one to jump on the latest bandwagon, CrunchGear is fully Google Buzz compliant. You can follow us here and maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to keep this Google start-up in business by sharing our pithy, witty commentary and expert opinions. → Read More
Merging something designed for public broadcasting (Buzz) with something inherently private (Gmail) was just looking for trouble.
Google is -deservedly – getting a lot of heat for the fact that its latest social product has a number of privacy flaws baked into it by design.
They’ve since made some improvements to the product, but that’s not where the story ends. → Read More
Over-sharing the minutiae of your life is already difficult, so why complicate things with Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare when you only need one service to rule them all? That’s where Google Buzz comes in and makes annoying your friends with news about your snacking habits that much easier. → Read More
Nothing kills a freeway Pandora jam session faster than the freaky-deaky alien speak that is GSM interference washing out your tunes. Once the pulsing of a GSM phone’s RF transmitter finds its way to a poorly shielded speaker, all hope of actually enjoying the music is lost. If you’re only using the iPod functionality of your iPhone, switching the phone into airplane mode is one option. Without GSM radio, there’s no GSM interference. Of course, that also means there’s no way to transmit voice or data. Missing important calls sucks, as does not being able to stream your tunes. So what’s an on-the-go audio lover to do? Find out over at MobileCrunch. → Read More
A true hi-def aficionado knows that just buying an HDTV and then getting drunk with your pals while you watch a Mets game is not the way to go when it comes to buying a new TV. Luckily, HQV shares the same distinctive taste with these HDTV fans and has created a disc in both Blu-Ray and HD DVD format for calibrating a new HDTV. Each disc contains various tests and assessment tools to make sure the TV you’re about to purchase is optimal. If a store like Best Buy doesn’t let you bring in a disc like this and test it, then they’re out of their mind and you should simply take your business elsewhere. Each DVD costs $20 and could end up saving you a lot more than that if it keeps you from buying a crappy HDTV. Product Page → Read More
BZZZZZZ. That’s the sound that speakers spit out whenever a cellphone or smartphone is about to ring, receive a text message or, for you BlackBerry users, receive an e-mail. And the noise is annoying people, let me tell you. The soon to be Murdoch-owned WSJ looks at the problem in-depth, getting the opinion of every Tom, Dick and Harry. Many people say they’re embarrassed to hear the speakers buzz, especially when in the middle of a board meeting or while giving a speech. Somehow, turning the stupid thing off eludes many of these people, which is a shame since that’s the only real solution to the problem right now. → Read More
