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Comment by nlanier | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I am in the large minority but so far I have found Buzz to be engaging and quite useful. I wanted to try out a local restaurant and put the question to Buzz and received eight insightful responses in less than an hour. I enjoy it and I think it has plenty of "stickiness" as a lot of my non-technophobe friends are already using it quite heavily.

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I actually think you aren't a minority. Many of my tech/web-less-literate friends are already using Buzz and liking it; it's mostly the techies and web developers and programmers that are saying "Oh, it'll fail like Wave" and "It's stupider than twitter and facebook, it'll die instantly".

I also like it, and am noting that others do too.

I agree. I'm finding it more useful than I thought I would. That it's integrated with gmail is a big part of it. Keyboard shortcuts work, and conversations I'm a part of show up in my inbox. I know Wave is about much more, but this may be all I wanted from it.

Yeah me too, and that was fast! I'm already so much more connected with a few people than I was a couple days ago. It's the difference between cool and warm with some acquaintances.

I used to be a hater toward FB and the like, but it's actually worked to make things a lot warmer with a lot of people, and I've really enjoyed it.

I see a lot of people still struggling with it, and of course others for whom it's just not interesting. I think more people should step out and try it though. It's social network virginity, and learning to be more open online is nerve-wracking at first, and fires up self-consciousness bigtime, but the outcome has been much more worth it than I expected.

Especially for those of us who've done a fair bit of contracting and city moves for jobs, that's meant a lot of upheaval and loss of friends and closeness, and it takes a long time to replace. I think that gets easier, and less valuable relationships are lost.

I am finding it to be an extension of some the great sharing and commenting that was happening around Google Reader. Sort of a hacker news between my contacts.

Like many of these things, if you are "friends" with lots of idiots, it's not going to be that useful. If you are friends with lots of smart people, you get some really cool stuff sent your way.

You could do this same thing on Twitter. Is the already large install base the only thing Google Buzz has going for it?

The first time I opened Buzz, I saw random thoughts from people in my neighborhood. If you're asking for restaurant suggestions, that's going to be far more helpful than Twitter, where you need to have people following you or searching for something in your tweet for people to ever see it.

I think what GMail did for conversations in email,GBuzz does for conversations in Twitter. The @reply mechanism and the retweet convention never really worked well for me in Twitter, although that may be because I was not using the necessary third party tooling to visualize it.

Also, you can add more than 140 characters, real links, pictures, etc. You lose some of the public version of SMS feel that Twitter has, but those constraints were becoming more of an annoyance to me.

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