Posted by Calixte Pictet | 6 comments
Google Buzz: Quality vs. quantity
The social media landscape is very complex. In other domains within IT competition is much easier to understand. Take the so-called “browser wars” for example: Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple, Opera, and others are constantly improving their browsers to gain marketshare. But all-in all, the browsers are the same. Some are faster, some have more functions, but their goal is to give you access to the same Internet.
With “social media,” things are different. As Google put it when they launched Buzz, people want to share what they see, hear, and read. This sharing is increasingly being done on the Internet. But the services that help us share and connect with people are extremely diverse, and the ecosystem is confusing. Some, like MySpace, are designed to connect users with random people that may share interests. Others, like Facebook, are based on existing social links. Microblogging services like Twitter and Identi.ca only allow you to post 140 characters. Facebook allows you to write status updates, post links and videos, create photo albums, and more.
Buzz did not attract immediate success. It’s actually still small and inactive compared to the other big social networks. Most estimates place Buzz’s activity to around 1000 new posts per hour. That’s low by any standard.
Of course, this number may not show the reality, and may be very badly interpreted by people who don’t know about the way Buzz functions. A great part of the interaction in Buzz is not the posts themselves, but rather the comments on them. Also, posts in Buzz are often much longer than any normal post on Facebook, and you can’t even compare Buzz’s posts to the very limited tweets. Google Buzz has a content that is very different from what can be seen on other social media sites. It is this content that makes it so different.
I got more active on Google Buzz over the past week, and I started loving it. Rich content makes updates much more readable, fun, and interesting than Facebook. I read insightful posts about politics, ideology, technology, and other topics. Buzz’s design showed me the conversation evolving in real time. The most impressive thing, however, was the richness of the discussions I saw. I never read any blatantly stupid post on Buzz, no internet trolls bashing in and ranting about whatever trolls talk about (i.e. not much), no flame wars about Mac versus Windows… I also realized that I never read any blatantly “stupid” comment or post on this platform. Could that be possible? Was I just lucky? Was I the only one to have such a great experience in Buzz or was this impression shared by other users? I asked this to other Buzz users to learn more.
Some of the users I asked told me they had seen trolls. Some told me flame wars did erupt from time to time. They also admitted that they were following several hundreds of users, and only a couple of trolls here and there. All of this with an almost inexistent anti-spam strategy from Google is quite impressive. Some may argue that Buzz’s small size is a factor, but that only explains so much.
Google may have been right when they said that they wanted Buzz to reduce the “noise” in social communication: Buzz does exactly that. With rich editing and the possibility to write whole blog posts, the content starts to matter much more than in other, more superficial, networks.
One-line status updates tend to be skipped by users for several reasons. First of all, the two or three one-line updates in a users’s feed are quickly drowned in longer, more developped posts. If that wasn’t enough, Buzz’s creators decided to automatically hide these one-line posts when they become too numerous. If one user starts bombarding his followers with half a dosen status updates (as is very common on Twitter), all but one will be collapsed, and therefore hidden from the viewers eyes unless he expressedly asks to see them. Secondly, posts that generate more comments are pushed up of the reader’s stream. This means that posts that ignite interesting debates will be more visible to users. Thought-provoking posts are therefore encouraged by the system. As a consequence, users have to focus primarily on what we are writing and less about boring stuff like the last dump they took if they want their content to be read.
Also, users are pushed to make thoughtful comments because that’s how you get more followers. It is interesting people that get more followers, both because they post more entertaining content and because they interact intelligently with others. That means that the so-called “trolls” quickly dissapear because they lose motivation after their lack/loss of followers. Buzz is therefore less prone to Internet trolls as forums where they (the trolls) can rest assured that their comments will be read as much as anyone else’s.
One of Buzz’s weak points is that it doesn’t use existing social links to create a network like Facebook does. Facebook’s greatest strength is the symetrical “friending” because it pulls in users and gives a motivation for users to get started with the service. People are generally not interested by what a random stranger is saying at first, but what their friends are doing is another matter.
This limitation is an advantage when it comes to content however. Sure, started by following some of my friends on Buzz, but they’re not numerous enough. That when I started looking for–and finding–people who posted genuinely interesting content. Now Buzz is my one-stop destination if I want to find interesting stuff on the web, talk about it, and share
Google Buzz has its quirks. In many ways it’s lacking compared to Facebook and the likes. But you get quality content if you just look a bit. That makes it my favorite social media network by far. Have you ever tried using Buzz? What’s your experience with the service?
I you use Google Buzz, you might want to follow TechHaze‘s Buzz. The author’s account can be found here.
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