How Google Buzz for mobile will change your life | Hacker News Reader

How Google Buzz for mobile will change your life

sfgate.com

13 pointsillumin813 comments

When I am out and about the last thing I want to do is post crap on my phone. Maybe I'm just old, but it seems rude to divert my attention from the people I am hanging out with in order to check/post on buzz.

Different strokes.

Are you never "out and about" by yourself?

Sometimes I'm out at a restaurant with my engineer buddies and we all want to know something. So I whip out my phone and start Googling. In that case I'm not just diverting attention from them, I'm serving them.

I think similarly there will be moments to check Buzz for the group.

If you're on a date with a hot chick/dude, just do it when s/he/you go/es to freshen up.

Twitter & FB have incontrovertibly shown that millions of people want to "post crap on [their] phone[s]" when they're out.

I think the location feature + mobile experience is what makes buzz stand out. Since buzz came out, everyday i am on my way to work (public transport) i check whats happening in my city. People commenting on the indian restaurant they are eating, others asking questions regarding the city and getting answers in a few minutes or posting pictures. Forget the gmail integration, it's the mobile experience that is great (on android atleast with integration in the native google maps application). I only use gmail to check for comments on posts i made on my mobile.

It is far more interesting to see whats going on in your city and communicate with locals then what twitter offers.

Bingo. When you get enough people using it, it's going to be amazing to be out after work with your friends wondering "what's happening that's fun?" and just look up fun things going on in the nearest half mile radius.

What struck me with this article was the requirement to "pull" the data. Take the waterfall example (someone buzzes about a cool waterfall they find). That is great, but for it to be useful to others they have to be hiking in the area, be a buzz user, AND have Buzz open. I think many of these location apps are missing the discovery piece and need someway to push content. If you are hiking and your phone vibrated and told you about the waterfall it would be much more useful.

I was using mobile maps with the buzz layer to get an idea of which parts of town had the most smart phone + social tech adoption. Pretty interesting. (The freeways are always popular...)

Facebook can have these features too, but they don't seem to go for them.

Maybe right after a lot of bad press about sharing a woman's info with her abusive ex-husband is not the best time to be touting a "Near me now" feature "baked right into the mobile version of Buzz". Why don't they just call it "Stalk me now"?

Nonsense. I use Google Buzz on an Iphone. It asks permission to use your location when you are writing a new buzz, shows the location info that will be attached clearly, which you can opt out of easily (click the X). Also, there is a big public/private button at the bottom of the screen. If you select 'private' you can select exactly the people who will view the buzz.

> The more people use a network, the more valuable it becomes; the more valuable it becomes, the more people use it

the more useless it becomes.

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