Can you articulate why you love Buzz?
Second, I love Buzz for the same reasons I love FriendFeed. It aggregates my interactions, which goes a long way towards healing the massive fragmentation problem that I currently have with social networks.
Third, the integration with Gmail means that, much like Mozilla's Raindrop project consolidates communication, my inbox is replaced by a more generic inflow.
Do you think Buzz could replace your FF usage, or do you think they're serving different purposes?
As for replacing FF, it's still pretty far from doing that. There's a lot of sites it doesn't connect to yet, and it doesn't offer tools like "rooms" and "invisible friends" that help a lot in organizing social interactions. Right now, Buzz feels like FF lite or something, and excels mainly for its tight integration with Gmail.
I've always thought that the tendency to view social network fragmentation as some sort of problem, rather than as a rather useful feature, is a major blind spot for programmers. This Buzz debacle does nothing to discourage that hypothesis.
I blame the database training. After you've spent enough time wrestling databases you begin to dream of putting the universe into normal form. You envision a world where every piece of data might be seamlessly linked to any other with some sort of super-powered JOIN command. This is the dream that leads people to think that single-sign-on across the entire web would be a great thing. Unfortunately, this dream is also Orwell's nightmare.
I have a lot of friends. Some of them are elderly former carpenters who have never used computers. Some of them are college-aged aspiring hackers. Some know me personally. Some know me mainly as a pseudonym on HN. Some of them are middle-aged hippie folk musicians. Some of them work for major military contractors. Some of them are professors on the tenure track. Some of them barely have a high school education. Some of them are millionaires. Some of them are unemployed. Some of them are theoretical physicists, but many more of them loathed high school physics.
I have no particular desire to put all of these people in the same room at the same time. The one occasion where I was compelled to approximate that even slightly -- my wedding -- was the occasion of more than a little stress, despite every single guest's friendliness and good cheer. Because it's really very difficult to throw a party where everyone you know feels equally welcome.
I would not be surprised to discover that social networks are going to remain fragmented because most people like them that way.
To me, it's important to have separation of control between the people that I know IRL (e.g. old high-school friends with whom I have to sometimes "dumb down" my natural style, at the risk of sounding like a haughty intellectual) and the people that I communicate with online, people with whom I'm interested mainly in sharing ideas / the interesting nerd info. The contexts are such that it's sometimes important for me to use proper logic, grammar, and syntax, and sometimes not.
Jeez. Do you manage to get any work done?