The Problem With Google Buzz Is That It Solves Google’s Problem At Your Expense | Hacker News Reader

The Problem With Google Buzz Is That It Solves Google’s Problem At Your Expense

mixergy.com

123 pointsAndrewWarner41 comments

To me, possibly the single best thing about Twitter is that it is missable and ignorable. If ignore my RSS reader for a while and come back, I'm overwhelmed by the number of unread posts and feel the need to catch up.

At Twitter (and Facebook for that matter) on the other hand, I can just pick up at the top of the stream. No bold number is telling me "you haven't read this!" I can simply ignore the tweets I missed, and pick up at the present.

Google adding this bold unread buzz number is already making me feel like I can get behind. And this right next to my inbox unread email count - something that I actually do need to keep in check.

I don't need social media adding unread anxiety.

I totally agree. I was really annoyed by the distraction until I discovered that I could just drag it into the [X More] group under my labels. No more pesky buzz reminders for me!

You can actually remove it completely by going to the bottom of gmail, and turn Buzz off.

That's a good point, but it also makes it two clicks away. I would think the best design would be to have it one click away while not providing unread-anxiety.

Agree. I think this is why I abandoned the Google Reader. First, I started culling all the frequently updated, seldom read feeds because they were inflating my unread count, then I stopped checking in. I went back to visiting the sites to see if anything new showed up.

Not sure how they would solve this, but I think you may be on to something. Emails are a burden. If you want to sell me something recreational, it can't trigger such an association.

You can turn off unread counts, which helps a fair bit. You'll know there's something unread, but there's less anxiety about the volume of things that are unread. Combined with a willingness to use Mark All Read without having looked at everything in a feed has made it pretty usable for me.

I've never really thought about it much. I'm just looking back and noticing that once I hadn't checked in for a week, I didn't want to check in. I was procrastinating about checking my feed reader instead of procrastinating by checking my feed reader.

Huh. I totally ignore buzzes in the way that I ignore tweets. I read them only when I have the time. I have no idea why buzz is generating so much Google hate.

Right now, I'm almost always catching up on twitter, even overnight. I ignore buzzes that I missed (mainly because the interface is too confusing to quickly read what's new).

To me, twitter is the main way of keeping up with what's going on with my friends and the world (I rarely consciously read "news"), so I want to miss as little as possible. I'm following around 350 people, mostly from my time zone. When I don't sleep in, catching up with the night timeline takes about 15 minutes; to me this is time well spent.

I don't know what role buzz will serve when the dust settles down; since the unread count doesn't distinguish uninteresting-comments-on-buzzes-I've-read from really new stuff, I'm mostly ignoring it anyway.

You have succinctly summed it all up. I take pride in inbox zero and I cannot stand that Buzz unread indicator. I don't mind the link or the service, just don't put the number of unread there.

You just made me delete my last RSS subscriptions. Now I rely on finding links in twitter messages. I am going to miss things. Looking forward to it.

I think one of the reasons Buzz has garnered so much back lash is because it really feels like this sudden intrusion. The other social sites bring at least as much noise, but you have to go and sign up for them. Once you are signed up for them, you have to grow your network over time, at a pace you can control. With Buzz, all you have to do is click "Okay" (which a lot of people do without even realizing), and suddenly you are hit with dozens of connections, and a lot of noise you had no idea you were asking for by clicking "okay". A lot of people who are annoyed now might have been fine with it if they had entered into it in a more organic fashion. I think it does promise to be a really convenient service. But the sheer suddenness and ubiquitousness of it almost guarantees a backlash.

I think the "backlash" is just tech-blog noise.

I actually look in Buzz, and I see people using it to talk. They may lose interest in this venue in a few months or a year, or it may remain viable, but they aren't raging about it.

This makes sense. As a user who expects to have control over the interface of my primary mail client, my first impulse was to hide the Buzz menu by dragging it into the "more" dropdown.

But I don't think a lot of users expect to have control over websites they use -- Facebook changes its interface every other month. Most users probably just ignore most of the page and focus on the two or three features they actually use.

Of course, the people who are actually using it aren't the ones raging about it. That doesn't really prove anything.

And vice versa. Knee-jerk tech-blog posts are no real barometer of how the Gmail-using public views Buzz.

Actually, I am using it, and I find the intrusion into my mailbox very irritating.

Exactly. I was actually really offended by this aspect of Buzz. Every other social network has had to gain user trust over time with years of community building and google just decides it can skip over that process by forcing it into gmail. Really rubbed me the wrong way, I switched it off 5 mins in

But is the number of people annoyed by the automatic adding greater than the number of people who would ignore the service if they had to bother going through all their contacts to add people manually?

I think that Google (basically) knew what they were doing. They probably foresaw a certain amount of backlash, but felt that giving their new network a big head start was worth the risk.

I was thrilled with that auto-setup feature. It was very easy to get everything up to speed. If I hadn't used social networks before I might have wanted a slow ramp-up, but I'm already comfortable with Facebook.

> I think one of the reasons Buzz has garnered so much back lash is because it really feels like this sudden intrusion.

The NSFW factor was also a surprise. Who knew some of the people I had exchange an email with had a proclivity for buzzing 'porn or art?' images ...

I disabled it specifically for this reason. Don't need more distractions. Then there is also the whole issue of people being able to see who you are following. Fine for social sites where I have to add people, but not fine when it's automatically based off of my private emails.

You can alternatively hide the Buzz label so it won't distract you unless you're looking for it. Settings > Labels > Buzz > Hide

There are also the small links at the very bottom of the page for turning off Chat and Buzz.

You can turn off public visibility of your contacts in your Google profile page. It's on right at the top.

"If Google cared about its users, it would recognize a major pain point for us: we have too many messages being flung at our footsteps every day, each demanding a response."

Sure, if by "us", you mean the 0.1% of people who are tech journalists, A list bloggers, or other people who populate the noise machine.

It always amuses me whenever I see a screenshot from facebook taken to demonstrate something and it has something like 300 unread messages and 80 pending friend requests.

The average person does not experience technology the same way that you do from inside your exclusive bubble.

Google automatically setting up your followers for you is bound to draw a lot of ire. Anytime a company takes data which users thought of as private and make it public users quite rightfully feel violated. However I don't think that Buzz is just creating more noise. As roc11 pointed out for him, and other users who get a large number of "check this out" emails, buzz really results in a decrease in noise. As to the complaint that Google should be concentrating on solving the data overwhelm problem; this is a really hard problem, Google would love to solve it (or even make the data only slightly less overwhelming), and they are certainly putting money into research that could lead to a solution, but you can't just solve hard problems because you want. They just take time.

"This post my [sic] seem like the ranting of a mad man." Don't kid yourself that's exactly what this.

One day someone will solve the problem of data overwhelm.

Some of us have already solved this, though it is typically done through the subtraction of technology, not the addition of it.

Maybe, I dunno, unfollow a few people?

Personally, I'm following people who'd have just sent me an IM or email if not for Buzz. So all Buzz really does, is compartmentalize the passed-link sorts of messages my friends and I were sending anyway.

So, in effect, Buzz has taken noise out of my email, my IM and my SMS and puts it into a box I can deal with on its own priority level.

That's a practical solution but the need to do this supports this article's basic point. It was in Google's best interest to opt-in all your contacts. For the user it would have undoubtably been a better experience if they could start with a clean slate or at least had a list of contacts to check/uncheck when Buzz was enabled for the first time. Google must have realized the potential risk of doing this but figured the land grab was worth it. I don't like that much.

I think the fact that they are, in a sense, late to the party on this stuff means they don't want to just take a passive approach to building a community of Buzz users.

I mean, I for one didn't mind it doing contact stuff for me. Saved me some time trying to add a bunch of people.

I'm not convinced a clean slate would be more desirable. I appreciated the feature; particularly as I've been rather surprised by who among my contacts has taken to the service thus far. The unfollows have been far fewer in number than the manual follows would have been.

I'm also not sure what interest Google would have that would be counter to the user's best interest. What is Google's motivation other than getting as many people as possible to use the service as much as possible? If the auto-populated follow list posed a conversion problem, wouldn't that also be counter to Google's best interest?

What's the ulterior motive that is served by auto-follow?

I'd sort of ignored the pre-release buzz on buzz; and then had it shoved in my face when I went to add an entry to a google calendar. I thought it was somewhat out of character for google, in that usually they make you ask for the new thing rather than handing you a bright shiny page saying you've been upgraded and dropping you into the profile editor.

I was fairly irritated, especially by the fact that a selection of my contacts was being made public. Most of these I have no problem with, but there are a few people with whom I am regularly in contact via email who are sensitive about their privacy. So google caused me to break flow and spend 10 minutes scrubbing my profile on their schedule, not mine.

After using it for a day or so, I like it. But I'd rather not be confronting deep issues of personal self-definition before I've finished my coffee in the morning.

I knew I could always turn off all the "distractions" and go back to real work. My e-mail client always represented "real work" -- with Google Buzz sitting inside of my e-mail client, it becomes nearly impossible for me to "turn off" my distractions.

You're a lucky man if your e-mail box is only for "real work." Mine tends to end up with all sorts of distracting crap inside it, plenty of it from people that should be working instead of mass e-mailing links to ridiculous Youtube videos...

Personally, I'll be kind of happy to have a lot of "fun" stuff that previously would have polluted my e-mail folder show up in the Buzz tab instead, which I consider, for all intents and purposes, ignorable.

I've got a TON of filters that "mark as read and archive"

I stopped using Facebook, Myspace etc. for this same reason. Too much stuff to keep on top of. Here's what I just did to disable Google buzz:

1. Scroll down all the way in your gmail 2. click 'turn off buzz' in Gmail view section

I hope Eric Schmidt and the rest of Google mgmt reads this. They need to get back to focusing on their mission and stop trying to do everything in every space.

One problem with Facebook for me is that I ignore it for long periods of time. I would rather be a bit more responsive there, but I forget to check it and ignore the emails I get. Putting it in my face like this might actually be a welcome thing in the end, even if it seems somewhat annoying at first.

It's also at our expense that Google is adding yet another shiny distraction so close to an application that so many of us are already too distracted to empty, our inbox.

At least we can disable Buzz.

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