Google Buzz

http://www.google.com/buzz

by mbrubeck • 16 years ago

175 171 16 years ago

google.com

pibefision3• 16 years ago

I think that it's a great move. GMAIL has 150MM users a month, you can bootstrap anything with that userbase.

and Wave?

joezydeco• 16 years ago

Is Buzz built with Wave? Can't find a mention anywhere, but it sure looks like Wave.

mbrubeck• 16 years ago

In response to a question at the press conference, they said the UI was "inspired by Wave." (Similarly, they said that it was not connected to Google Latitude now, but "over the next year" they hope to bring them closer together.)

yungchin4• 16 years ago

That's what I never got about Wave - that they didn't somehow integrate it with Gmail, not even loosely.

After I got a Wave account I invited a couple of friends, and they checked it out - signing in once, and forgetting about the whole service after that. So I tried including them in a few "waves", but there was no option to get email notifications of new waves! Of course they never returned, and the next time 'round I'd just email them again...

roc• 16 years ago

I've been thinking that they should initially roll WAVE out as plumbing.

They could transplant GMail/Buzz/Google Talk/etc to run on Wave without forcing people to learn the interface up-front. Users would be building up content 'in' Wave and Google would be slowly integrating the features that Wave makes easy.

Then the Wave interface (the biggest stumbling block for most) can be introduced as an optional power-user interface; but wholly compatible in case people want to bounce back and forth as they ease in and backward-compatible with people who aren't ready to take the plunge. (fully backward compatible, in the case of other GMail users)

I just don't think Wave is there yet.

levesque3• 16 years ago

Wave is still choppy for me.

agotterer• 16 years ago

Doesn't add a Buzz option to my gmail. Working for anyone else?

larsr• 16 years ago

"We're still rolling out Buzz to everyone, so if you don't see it in your Gmail account yet, check back soon."

(doesn't work yet for me either)

r11t• 16 years ago

During the live event they mentioned that it might take up-to a few days for Buzz to show up in Gmail for everyone.

jkincaid2• 16 years ago

Try accessing it from Android/iPhone (buzz.google.com). I can access it on my phone even though it isn't popping up in Gmail yet.

jm4• 16 years ago

When I go to buzz.google.com from an Android phone I get redirected to a Mobile Help page listing the supported phones. Is this happening to anyone else?

[edit]

It looks like only Android 2.0+ is supported and the HTC Hero still runs 1.5. Lame.

Pahalial• 16 years ago

If you use the mobile UI and have someone comment on your post, it will send the thread to your inbox. Trying to reply to that thread will then force-update your gmail to include Buzz (or at least, it worked for me.)

robgough2• 16 years ago

The same thing didn't work for me unfortunately.

delackner• 16 years ago

on iphone I see the buzz UI, despite it not being visible before on a normal PC browser. Thanks!

portman• 16 years ago

This did not work for me, either. sadTrombone

intellectronica4• 16 years ago

Is Google becoming the new Microsoft? Not in the evil sense, but in the lame me-too products that rely on brute force (their huge install base) and no innovation to hopelessly try to compete sense.

hexis• 16 years ago

I think they also are probably releasing products in order to confuse competitors and developers. Joel on Software calls this "Fire and Motion" when Microsoft used to do it. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

intellectronica4• 16 years ago

That's an interesting perspective. That would sort of put them in the 'evil' bucket, and I really don't think they are (or maybe I'm being naive?)

cantastoria6• 16 years ago

Google has always been this way as far as I can tell. They're basically using Microsoft's old strategy of "clone it and give it away so we can sell more of Windows" only with Google it's ads.

The difference is everyone still loves them. Microsoft was seen as ruthlessly destroying their competition. Google is seen as innovative. Bizarre.

wvenable• 16 years ago

Open source software is frequently a clone of commercial software and free. If that were enough to be "evil" then everything would be evil. Nobody is claiming that Google is innovative in this example.

kesun4214• 16 years ago

Not bizarre if you consider Google actually gives away source code of some of their best products for free. Microsoft just couldn't do this.

ewjordan• 16 years ago

Microsoft was seen as ruthlessly destroying their competition. Google is seen as innovative. Bizarre.

Google gives away a ton of free services that work. Microsoft sells people something that they have (almost) no option not to buy, and causes a near infinite stream of headaches to just about everyone (even if you don't use it yourself - how many times have you had to help out friends or relatives whose Windows installations got screwed up?).

Sure, giving stuff away may be a cheap ploy to earn goodwill, but I can truly say that Google's services have provided me with a lot of value. In the old days of Microsoft that was true for them, too, but over the past decade Microsoft products have done little more than cost me time and money.

Is it really that bizarre that I feel differently about the two companies?

michaelcampbell2• 16 years ago

What did Microsoft ever give away to sell more Windows? (Serious question.)

nostrademons2• 16 years ago

Depends. GMail was fundamentally innovative - do you remember what webmail was like before it launched? GMail gave us a gig of storage and Google search over your inbox and threaded conversation view and keyboard shortcuts and a UI that didn't require page refreshes between each message.

Similarly, Maps was fundamentally innovative. If you went to GMaps c. 2005 and then went to MapQuest, there was absolutely no comparison. I kept wanting to drag the map around to see what was just offscreen. And then Maps kept innovating with satellite imagery, and Street View, and local business labels on the satellite imagery, and double-click-to-find-the-best-vantage-point.

Then there are a bunch of me-too products that succeed only because its Google and everyone already uses them.

Unfortunately this includes everything I've done at Google, but I'm hoping they've set things up for future innovation. Real innovation takes time, usually 3-4 years. Google's strength has been that they're willing to devote that time, but you can't have every single product out the door be a hit.

jimbokun• 16 years ago

"Microsoft was seen as ruthlessly destroying their competition."

There was also the fact that they blackmailed PC vendors into not installing Netscape.

yungchin4• 16 years ago

I really liked Chris Dixon's post "What's strategic for Google?" from a while back: http://cdixon.org/2009/12/30/whats-strategic-for-google/ ... following his line of thinking, this may be a lame me-too product, but they _have_ to run it anyway: if they allow Facebook to move a lot of user-hours away from the internet to what is really a big intranet, that would kill Google's revenue.

intellectronica4• 16 years ago

Right, so the interesting twist in Google's story is that because of their dominance in the open web it is in their interest to protect the open nature of the web, rather than lock users into another walled garden. That's pretty cool, and I think they've been very smart to position themselves that way. It's still surprising how they completely fail to innovate in some areas, though.

eagleal• 16 years ago

So, just my thought, Google's primary mission is not search and advertsing, but has changed to be a wheel in a pool full of small fishes.

mawhidby2• 16 years ago

From the looks of it, Google has integrated Buzz into their existing products (gmail, maps, places) that makes it more than just a me-too product. Specifically, a big advantage is in the way Buzz integrates with Gmail - it's brilliant.

Compare how you would reply to an email notification from Facebook or Twitter: you'd have to login to the site and post your reply (or even see the actual reply) there. With Buzz, it's inline.

waterlesscloud• 16 years ago

Which assumes people don't move to Facebook email.

Migration of my friends to FB email seems far more likely to me than migration of all my social graph to Google Buzz.

It would also be trivial for FB to allow response to notifications via external email if they decide to do it.

I think people are seriously underestimating the value of Facebook's existing graphs. They've been shaped over a couple of years now to what most people want them to be. The vast majority are not going to leave that behind for a me-too service.

kesun4214• 16 years ago

Totally agree... rather than shipping a stand alone product and dragging along users to use them, they simply integrated a new product into a very successful one. Plus, the new product fits perfectly.

adrianwaj4• 16 years ago

Actually, Google more resemble Sun Microsystems to me: 1 revenue generating product (search with ads as, as opposed to servers) and then building an eco-system around it to support it (by using open standards.))

I think Sun's revenues also came from Software and Services, but mostly servers. We all know what happen to Sun. I don't know where Google can find its next cash cow.

philwelch• 16 years ago

I had a similar insight when Google announced a tablet concept: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1094476

Microsoft's business strategy has always been a kind of unfocused. They didn't ever sit down and say DOS or BASIC or Word was going to be the cornerstone of their business, they just did what they thought would be useful at the time until they managed to hit on something. You can tell because, though I can't say anything for their old BASIC's, DOS wasn't even very good! As Microsoft got big enough to parallelize this strategy, it turned into a kind of shotgun strategy where they simultaneously tried to build web browsers and gaming consoles and mobile phone operating systems and MP3 players and webmail and everything else. If you read The Road Ahead, Bill Gates writes about Wang, which was enormously successful but missed the PC wave just long enough to go out of business. After Microsoft's own close call with the internet (ironically around the time The Road Ahead was written and first published), I'm sure these fears intensified to the point where Microsoft started jumping after every hot new thing, be it multitouch, MP3 players, search engines, or whatnot.

The contrast to this is Apple in the respective Jobs eras, which focused intensely on building a few great products. It's a far riskier strategy--if Apple invents the Macintosh and no one wants one, what then?

Google's had a shotgun approach as well--I don't know why, but it seems like a good use of the talent they seem so intent on recruiting. Part of the shotgun approach is that some products are better than others, but a likely bad part of the approach is that you are prone to go chasing after every new trend.

cantastoria6• 16 years ago

I wish we could see more evidence of this talent in their products.

It seems like their "shot-gun" approach is to release a lot a half-baked crap just to generate some headlines and then hope people forget about it (e.g. Wave). I think this used to work when they were competing with Microsoft (which also released half-baked crap but for got called on it.. constantly). But now I think a lot of companies are releasing good products right out of the gate (e.g. Apple, Facebook) and this strategy is going to be less successful in the future.

ashu2• 16 years ago

Argh what is the point of comments like these? It is totally drowning out any useful discussion about the actual merits or demerits of the product. The iPod was a lame "me-too" product, eh?

intellectronica4• 16 years ago

Actually the same can be said of your answer :-/ That the iPod was a me-too product is an interesting comment, because it reminds us to look at what was special about it (beautiful design, tight integration with the desktop and media store). What's special about Buzz?

brk• 16 years ago

I actually thought his comment was moderately insightful (ie: it's not totally original, but in the context of the hype around Buzz, it's a question worth pondering).

The iPod was not a me-too product. It was the first digital music player that took a more comprehensive approach to solving the problem around finding/getting music content from the "cloud" (back when "the cloud" was just simply called the interwebs) to your player. When the iPod first launched, many people did not initially look any deeper then the surface.

Perhaps once we look past the surface of Buzz, we'll see that it brings something to the table that has been missing in social status sites. Or, perhaps Buzz is Google's Zune.

DannoHung• 16 years ago

It's not enough to copy a product to get the anger. You have to achieve dominance and then stagnate. Take Google Reader for example. When it started out, Bloglines was the superior web reader. Over time and through innumerable upgrades, GR developed a fundamentally superior product.

Also, Google's thing has literally always been to launch half baked ideas, get reaction, and then iterate. All the while never charging anyone except for the eyeballs.

Tawheed• 16 years ago

GR didn't incrementally get better, Paul B. joined the team and re-started it from scratch applying lessons learned and principles from GMail.

lanstein• 16 years ago

How exactly is Wave not innovative? Not to mention the obvious GMail, Earth, Maps, Adwords/Adsense, ...

vegashacker• 16 years ago

The difference is that I still don't really get what Wave's about, and I think a lot of folks agree. I still remember the first time I saw Google Maps--I got it instantly, and I was blown away. And the intial value proposition of Gmail (a gig of storage) was obvious too.

artagnon• 16 years ago

The difference is quite simple.

Microsoft started off with an unpopular operating system, and forced it down users' throats by tying up with the hardware manufacturers. Users don't have much of a choice in the matter. I think they lost contact with their end users at some point. Today, they're stuck with the NIH syndrome, and keep running around in circles, without making an effort to understand the way the market/ competition has changed.

Google started off making good useful (and I'd say innovative) products like Google Search and GMail. They got their users to like them and focused heavily on keeping up with their customers' wants. They post pictures of their office, and talk about their "cool" work culture, and manage to get the public drooling all over. Microsoft didn't think any of this was important. At some point, Google will probably start becoming a sloppy uninteresting company that forces new products down their existing customers' throats. Still, a smarter successor.

ytinas3• 16 years ago

Google is a better MS in the same way that MS was a better IBM. And for me personally Google is synonomous with NIH. I mean, a search/ads company making their own Phone? Operating system??? Router?!

Zak• 16 years ago

I find it very odd that they depict the iPhone on top of the N1. To me, that conveys a position of higher status for Google's competitor and that doesn't make much sense.

TotlolRon• 16 years ago

Maybe the page designer has a "tell" :)

Raphael• 16 years ago

Well, it's true. There are more iPhones in use than devices running Android.

chaosmachine• 16 years ago

Everyone recognizes the iPhone, very few will know what the N1 is.

jkincaid2• 16 years ago

There are many, many more iPhones and iPod Touches out there than there are Nexus Ones. Google wants as many people as possible to be using this, so they're showing these people that it will work with their devices.

They'll save the 'superior device' angle for other features where the size of the user base is less important (GPS Navigation).

pibefision3• 16 years ago

Check the API (http://code.google.com/intl/es/apis/buzz/)

pibefision3• 16 years ago

Also http://twitter.com/Google_Buzz

adrianwaj4• 16 years ago

I wonder if Google's API docs on the whole are too comprehensive. Most people just want to get to the meat fast, and then consume it. Twitter's API doc is one page.

tdmackey• 16 years ago

Thought it was a little funny to see that http://buzz.com/ seems to be a similar unlaunched service from AT&T with the same name.

It seems they've managed to roll up what a lot of others were doing into a seemly nicely integrated package. I would like to think that this will give location based networks the push they need to become more mainstream.

thwarted2• 16 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1079765

mrfabbri• 16 years ago

Accessing http://m.google.com/app/buzz from an iPhone works whether or not you see the buzz label in gmail. You can use Firefox with the "User-Agent Switcher" add-on set on iPhone to try it out.

ashishbharthi• 16 years ago

iPhone webpage works for me but it still have issues when you post updates. I tried posting two updates, it kept going but updates were never posted.

jokermatt999• 16 years ago

Similarly, buzz.google.com worked on my Droid, despite not having the buzz link in gmail.

jfno673• 16 years ago

Just tried it out on my Android, can someone tell me why I'll go to Foursquare now... This is the best checkin interface yet.

jganetsk• 16 years ago

Because Foursquare incentivizes you to use it a hundred ways from Sunday, including games and promotions.

jfno673• 16 years ago

Yes that could be it, but I can tell you in new cities incentives are not big. When I see Buzz with Google Local Listings (with coupons), and place page I feel like I will not be using Foursquare that much. I'm probably wrong though, I was excited about Wave too.

ableal• 16 years ago

Early warning at Blogoscoped: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1090344

mrtron• 16 years ago

It is a well engineered twitter.

Will be interesting to see if it can gain enough momentum to be useful. I am betting yes - due to the simpler embedding of media.

grandalf3• 16 years ago

oddly I don't see buzz anywhere in my gmail even after clicking on the link to enable it...

marciovm123• 16 years ago

they don't roll out to everyone simultaneously. think A/B testing.

grandalf3• 16 years ago

I must be in the control group...

mmastrac• 16 years ago

It's not rolled out to everyone in Gmail, but mobile should work (http://m.google.com/app/buzz) for anyone with an iPhone or Android device.

[edit] I missed an 's' in the URL. Android doesn't seem to like that URL, but the iPhone does.

Semiapies2• 16 years ago

This 404s in my Droid; http://buzz.google.com works, though.

Joe_Bananas• 16 years ago

Yo dawg, I heard you like web 2.0 so I put a web 2.0 in your web 2.0 so you can web 2.0 while you web 2.0.

david9272• 16 years ago

That was both funny and witty. Come on, HN, lighten up!

david9272• 16 years ago

Ok, listen up, HN. I love this community because you're smart and ambitious, but we need to have a talk.

The Winter Olympics (& World Cup) are coming up. If we're lucky and live beyond our life expectancy, it's one of maybe 20 we could possibly see. 20. That's how short life is.

A long time ago I was getting into film direction and saw a contest in town for 8mm film shorts. So I wrote a screenplay, gathered eight of my friends together, and in one long day, we shot it. Weeks later when it came back from the labs, I took it to a guy I knew (who was also involved in putting the contest on) who had a projector. I was so excited. I was so proud of what I had done. I began rehearsing, in my mind, answers to such questions as, "How did you achieve such genius with so little background in film?", "What was your inspiration?", etc. The projector spun the film; I held my breath. We couldn't see anything; I hadn't used enough light. (In all my books on film direction, lighting an 8mm didn't come up.) The guy said, as he walked me out, "But you had fun making it right?" I took it almost as a taunt. I thought, "Fuck fun. I didn't want fun. I wanted that fucking film to turn out."

So you're on Hacker News because you like technology? That technology is going to be obsolete in at most a few Winter Olympics from now. You're on HN because you have a startup? If you have a great idea and you execute well with a great team... the odds are not even remotely in your favor. Ask anyone in the business. Not even remotely.

Today when I think back, do you know what I remember from that 8mm film I made? How much fun my friends and I had making it. We had a blast. That day is a wonderful, glorious memory. Whether or not the film turned out was always irrelevant.

Everything you think and love and see and know has an expiration date on it. 20 Olympics -- at most -- if you're lucky. And when you're old and smoking that last cigar (because fuck it) and you close your eyes, what will you remember? Do you know? I'll tell you. Not the film. You won't even remember what the film was about. No, you'll remember the day you shot it. "But you had fun making it?" Did you? It can sound like a taunt, but it's not. It's everything. God, be ambitious. Be smart. Good for you. But have fun. Most of all, have fun.

Laugh, HN. Let your hair down. Have sex. Drink wine from the bottle. Dance like madman. Have fun. For the love of God. You have 20 and it's all you'll ever have. Have fun.

alexandros2• 16 years ago

One thing that just struck me, is that google/gmail will not be banned from workplace computers as often as fb/twitter have been. This alone will be a significant advantage.

FreeRadical• 16 years ago

I think in most corporates (outside the software industry) it's the other way around. I can't access gmail/hotmail but can access social networks at work (in finance).

jfno673• 16 years ago

Doing consulting in insurance companies, I can tell you Facebook have been banned for a long time, and twitter more recently. As an outside consultant I have gmail, but the employees sometimes don't have it.

tdm911• 16 years ago

i've mostly seen similar, though they tend to block webmail and social networking sites. data leakage through people sending out confidential documents via webmail is a real concern for big business.

carbon8• 16 years ago

My impression has been the opposite, that facebook/myspace/etc are blocked more than webmail. The only recent survey I could find that touched on both social neworking and webmail is this one from august:

http://www.scansafe.com/content/employers-crack-down-social-...

"76% of companies are choosing to block social networking ... and Webmail (58%)"

Of course, if this thing caught on, presumably more companies would block gmail.

qeorge2• 16 years ago

I've asked a couple of friends with corporate jobs, and they said Gmail is usually open but FB is blocked. They also said it doesn't matter, because everyone has a smartphone.

Not a great data point, but interesting none the less.

gxs• 16 years ago

I've been fortunate enough to never have been employed at a company where the employer things its good practice to ban certain websites. How common is this? What field do you work in?

alexandros2• 16 years ago

Thankfully in academia things are very relaxed. I just thought of a friend who has this problem and then I realised I know at least 2-3 people in office jobs who have similar issues. I'm in the UK btw.

frognibble• 16 years ago

It's common enough that Gmail has a feature to allow blocking the chat feature and not all Gmail. http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

Lazlo_Nibble2• 16 years ago

In financial services there are excellent regulatory and operational reasons for blocking a wide variety of web sites.

Teulon2• 16 years ago

I've worked in Healthcare, Law Enforcement and the Military; the only time it wasn't blocked was when I had my own company.

JoshRosen• 16 years ago

Perhaps there will be an option to disable Google Buzz for the Google Apps version of Gmail.

kerringtonx2• 16 years ago

I'm more excited to use this than Wave. =/

kloncks• 16 years ago

In the picture on the website, why is the Nexus One being covered by the iPhone?

It should be the other way around.

eam• 16 years ago

I agree! Maybe they're trying to "not be evil".

highstakefever2• 16 years ago

What I don't understand is how people seem to be okay with Buzz being built into gmail. Don't we have enough of social networks that steal our time? Now we have one in or inbox? Not super excited about that fact.

robgough2• 16 years ago

I'm more concerned about how it will work over IMAP - or does IMAP just ignore the buzz mails?

robotron• 16 years ago

Then turn it off. I'm okay with chat in Gmail - when I want to chat. If I don't want to chat I simply sign off. Simple enough. Options are good.

highstakefever2• 16 years ago

I understand you will be able to turn it off, just like you can logout from Facebook. That's not the issue. It's the idea of creating something of this kind in a "holy place" like your inbox.

albemuth• 16 years ago

G1 won't run it, needs Android 2.0+ I guess it's good that they're not letting old platforms slow down development, but FFS, a bit over a year and the G1 can't run any of the new stuff. They should never have sold it with such weak hardware... Still waiting on an 850 Nexus :(

fnid2• 16 years ago

I wonder if, when a company crosses a threshold we all think violates a Nash equilibrium, we start to oppose the company. With this move, Google is declaring war on a host of web companies that are heretofore thriving and collaborating and making tons of money.

Every dollar of advertising that Facebook makes is a dollar or even more from Google. Every minute that facebookers facebook, google isn't showing them ads and isn't getting click throughs and this amounts to a vastly larger sum of money than any new search engine or aggregator or individual media company which google has already rendered moot to a large extent.

This is real time search which everyone has been asking for with all the data stored on google's super voluminous uber-fast lightning machine with its neurons and axons keeping the world connected and communicating.

Here it is and we don't want it.

The competition is for virtual real estate. Everywhere there is blank space on the screen or blank time in the consumer day or a blank wall in the virtual world, there will be an ad on it, just as today there are ads in nearly every physical space: Public transportation, Bar room mirrors, big screen tvs... Nothing is safe. No one is safe from Google and they have crossed the nash equilibrium where everyone is competing against them, including the websites where they get their content and the websites where people go to pass time.

yungchin4• 16 years ago

> I wonder if, when a company crosses a threshold we all think violates a Nash equilibrium, we start to oppose the company.

Do you mean "we, the people" or "we, the people who think in terms of Nash equilibria"? ;)

More seriously: I don't think I care about how big the company is. Rather, I care about the quality of the product, and whether I am free to leave it for a competitor's product. Google is actually trying to make it easy for you to leave if you choose to, and take your data with you - they're even inviting you to report their failures in that regard at www.dataliberation.org - so that's quite good.

If they don't make it easy for me to interact with Facebookers/Twitterers/whateverers, I'll end up visiting Facebook/Twitter/whatever instead, and vice versa - what's wrong with that? I'm not an economist, but this sounds like a healthy competitive landscape to me?

MikeCapone• 16 years ago

Indeed. There are small companies that are horribly restrictive with their products/services, a lot more than some big companies.

It's about quality, not size.

sketerpot2• 16 years ago

> Do you mean "we, the people" or "we, the people who think in terms of Nash equilibria"? ;)

The latter, of course. WE ARE A NEW PEOPLE! WE WILL PREVAIL!

More seriously, I don't care about how big the company is either, as such -- but I do worry about a company that gets so big and so diversified that it may become anticompetitive and stifle innovation. Remember when Microsoft had the power to hold back innovation, and we were stuck with IE6 for years and years? Didn't that just suck?

Google is being a lot better about this, mind you. They seem to genuinely care about interoperability and making it possible for competitors to beat them by being better. And they've got good products and smart people and a non-broken management structure. I feel good about Google. Nevertheless, a Google-dominated web is something to worry about. I hope that there are always viable alternatives. Not because I think Google is evil and corrupt, but because I worry that they could become so.

murrayb• 16 years ago

> With this move, Google is declaring war on a host of web companies that are heretofore thriving and collaborating and making tons of money.

Actually I think Google is just escalating their war with FB, the other companies you refer to could end up being collateral damage though.

fan• 16 years ago

What game does this Nash Equilibrium correspond to? How are we modeling the world such that the eqm. changes?

I don't see the "shift" as obvious at all.

ekanes• 16 years ago

>> With this move, Google is declaring war on a host of web companies that are heretofore thriving and collaborating and making tons of money.

From the perspective of those other companies they are indeed "declaring war" and it's all very dramatic... but for actual users, this is just another company competing for their attention by providing a better service.

I expect the product will fail because Google sucks at social stuff, but in principle more competition is good, and unless a company competes unfairly through a monopoly (and they don't have one for email or social networking.)

DanielBMarkham2• 16 years ago

Wow. Lookout lots of web companies. You're wallowing along in the middle of the road and this huge truck is barreling down on you at 100 kph. The truck's name is Google.

For the less metaphorically-inclined, Google has so much money and is doing so much development that they've reached the point that they are actively trying to obsolete hundreds of companies. You can certainly argue that perhaps these companies deserve to be replaced. Google is becoming the Wal-Mart of the web.

techiferous• 16 years ago

They're not necessarily barreling over other smaller companies; sometimes they buy them which is a welcome exit for the founders.

DanielBMarkham2• 16 years ago

I agree. It's a great thing for those companies.

My point is that they have so many resources and so much raw computing power on the line that almost by accident they can burn to rubble dozens of different business models.

Overall some consolidation is probably a good thing, but I am continuously reminded of WalMart. WalMart perfected retail sales in much the same way as Google is perfecting rich internet applications. WalMart was able to deliver products cheaper than anybody else. Google in many cases just gives stuff away. WalMart drove out lots of small shops. Google seems to be doing the same. WalMart had a goal of dominating the market. Google wants to store every piece of data on the planet.

I'm perfectly happy shopping at WalMart -- they do a great job of providing me stuff at the best prices I can find. I'm not so convinced that I am as happy getting all of my internet data from Google. I'm NOT saying they're some kind of evil empire, just I'm beginning to feel more and more uncomfortable about them. It looks like whatever is the flavor of the week there's Google out there peddling their version of it.

jraines• 16 years ago

Does anyone know if it works through Maps on Android 1.6? I just got the update on my G1 and posted an update through Maps, but it doesn't seem to show up on the Buzz layer.

loki99• 16 years ago

Obviously you need to have 2.0+, which sucks!

Scott_MacGregor• 16 years ago

Now who in here will be the first to develop a slick dedicated Windows desktop sidebar client for this, or an Outlook plugin?

If it was a Microsoft product, it would probably run right on the desktop in a sidebar. Then they would have a developers conference for it in Las Vegas with a free brunch too. [A different promotional stratagy than Google].

zitterbewegung• 16 years ago

I think this is basically location aware microblogging. This might be pretty disruptive in the space with the integration and the ease of use. Also, auto discovery is done pretty well.

chintan2• 16 years ago

Brizzly cloned?

I find that the Buzz interface is highly similar to Brizzly which was similar to Gmail developed by ex-Googlers working on Gmail/Google Reader. Its like all deja vu. O God I'm so buzzed out!

chintan2• 16 years ago

Try the Near-By option on iPhone in NYC.

Its definitely a Foursquare killer.

kesun4214• 16 years ago

Watched the Buzz video a few times, does it look like a simpler, faster, easier to understand version of Google Wave???

prabhu-pd2• 16 years ago

this one's a winner!

prabhu-pd2• 16 years ago

first it givith then taketh away

Semiapies2• 16 years ago

Google is the new Microsoft in one sense: if they say or announce anything, geeks will spend more time talking about how they hate/fear/distrust Google than about the product.

jsz02• 16 years ago

I'm going to reserve final judgement until I actually get a chance to use the service and see the direction Google wants to take it. My first reaction is not positive. This feels like Google's Microsoft Money moment Go into a market with an established leader, use your size and dominance to undermine the competition just because you're the 800lbs gorilla and you need to be fed at any cost. There doesn't appear to be anything new here. Just a Google logo.

enneff• 16 years ago

Have you looked at the Geo features? The integration with several existing services? Of course it is not a new idea, but to say "just a Google logo" does a great disservice to the team who've been working hard on this project.

jsz02• 16 years ago

No, I haven't got it yet. That's why I'm reserving judgement of the actual service until I can use it. Google's engineers are fantastic and I'm sure it's a good service. My concerns are purely on the business/competitive side.

csmeder2• 16 years ago

I cant get Buzz to show up in my gmail, what am I doing wrong?

bockris• 16 years ago

Comment further down on this page

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112969

csmeder2• 16 years ago

thank you

gcb• 16 years ago

google is going the way of older internet giants.

Their main focus is search and adwords ...and more recently snooping dns.

Now instead of letting facebook do their thing and google offering competitive ads, they choose to do facebook thing.

Now what? They are going to clone all the sites that their users spend more than 15minutes on?

They`re going to spread their peanut butter too thin.

badave• 16 years ago

It's try to buy, and if that fails, try to compete. At Google's size, it would be very, very, very difficult to spread their peanut butter too thin, and their Superbowl Ad indicates that they are focusing on what everyone knows them best for and only dipping their feet into other pools that they can't buy into.

kerringtonx2• 16 years ago

I like Buzz after using it a bit more on my iTouch (still not available on my computer yet ... :/ ). Still trying to decide if I like Buzz better than Foursquare. It's really fun checking in and competing with your friends, but if you don't live in a populated area like myself, there seems to be not as much interaction. When I signed on with Buzz, there were already people interacting. Sharing tips about restaurants, what they were doing for the day, how they liked Buzz, and etc. Both are definitely fun though! Anyone get to use it on their PC? How is it??

levesque3• 16 years ago

It cannot even access facebook?

Google Buzz

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