Ask HN: Why did Google Buzz fail?

Different companies are great at different things. Obviously generalizing a bit here, but...just to give an example...

...Apple makes really great hardware and good software, but would you expect them to make the best social site in the world? Maybe, if they really put their minds to it they could, but it's just not part of who they are. For instance, they have one of the world's biggest captive audiences in their suite of music software, but can't add basic 1.0 features and interactions to their repetitive attempts to make a music social network inside of iTunes. It's not even funny anymore, just really sad.

...Google is very smart at algorithms and dealing with massive scale, but would you similarly expect a bunch of smart nerds to build the best possible platform for sharing or rating stuff with your friends? What limited social success they've had with YouTube they've had to just buy, and even this they almost screwed up with their ridiculous abortion of a Google Plus integration.

It's not that these companies don't have talented people inside who are capable, just there's probably a lot of corporate momentum and interference from managers on top who dictate that things need to be done a certain way.

I remember friends loving it, as it was built into gmail in a way that the people behind @facebook.com email addresses can now only dream of. It's roll out, as a opt out social network with poor default privacy, was probably the wrong way to go, and lead to lawsuits and a lot of problems. I mean, I think they were dogfooding, and knowing where your coworker is at the Google Plex or who they talk to most often is a lot less concerning then if it's just any email correspondent.

Let that be a lesson on dogfooding.

But it didn't fail, exactly. It got sunset, rolled up in what I would guess was a collective organized push to build a single social sign on. And arguably some of the lessons were applied to Google+, where circles can be seen as a way to deal with buzz's privacy protection drama.

The truth is Google keeps trying to pull users away from their gmail and google docs with hangouts and google+ and google photos into a second tab, when what people really want is a SPA that handles it all inside Gmail.

Facebook is trying to do something of the same with Messenger and mobile.

But honestly, Google could probably, at any point, deal Slack and Hipchat a huge blow by sticking channels and channel management features in Google Apps for Business, maybe adding some optional google wave magic or contextual ad inclusion (you mention Twilio or Mandrill, it shows an ad for a similar company). So Buzz may rise again in some form, perhaps less influenced by blog posts and more by RT chat.

But I'm not a part of Google, and I'm just talking. I don't know him, but I'm going to reach out to the former Google Buzz PM and ask if he'll respond here.

Too little too late, had google launched plus at the time it might have had a chance but buzz was too weak to be a real competitor to facebook at that stage, and plus was waaaay too late and to make matters worse google made it uncool by pushing it to existing youtube users.

I used Buzz a lot with myself and family. I think one of the points that made it fail the most was simply that it was set up to fail and not given the love it needs.

I mean it wasn't getting the slick integration of photo previews, etc that were emerging or that already existed on other platforms.

Privacy snafu derailed it. Some warnings were ignored, and it ended badly.

It was used extensively internally to Google prior to launch, and worked great. I am slightly disappointed it did not get rolled out as an enterprise product.

Because it had a very disjointed user interface and most people just didn't see the point.