Logging in to Google Mail yesterday brought a wave of excitement. Having heard about Google’s new product – Google Buzz – on Twitter, and having seen some of the hype it was getting from the techblogs, I was desperate to try it out.
Bluntly, though, Buzz was a dissapointment. Google have taken Facebook’s status updating functionality, including comments and likes, and added some of Twitter’s best features – such as geotagging. In terms of functionaility, it does nothing more than Twitter and Facebook combined. I had been further excited by being led to believe that Google had integrated Twitter right in. Great, I thought, I can update Twitter straight from my inbox – maybe I can even share links I stumble across?
Unfortunately this is not the case. Twitter integration runs like adding your Twitter Atom feed into Google Reader. Periodically (some time after actually posting) your Tweet shows up in your Buzz timeline. Anything you write in Buzz doesn’t go back to Twitter, in fact Google doesn’t even get you to sign in to Twitter – it just reeds your RSS feed (which won’t work if you keep your profile private, even though Buzz could import your Tweets and post them out using it’s private feature). You can follow people that have Google Mail, but you can’t see the people you follow on Twitter, so Buzz becomes, rather than an aggregator, another service.
The same issues are true for Flickr and YouTube. Add something to Flickr, your Buzz buddies see it. Add media in to a Buzz update, it ain’t going back the way data gets through.
Seriously, how hard would it be to make a single social media site that does … everything? I love the design of the Twitter site, so that’s a definite starting point. Facebook has the best functionality, so that’s got to be there. Flickr is the coolest photo service out there, so you’ve got to be able to see a user’s photostream. The homepage has to be like both Twitter’s and Facebook’s, your friends’/people you follow’s status updates. At the top you should be able to post, anything. A photo should be sent to Flickr, and there should be a way of choosing a set to add it to. Your post should appear in Twitter, and Facebook should get all your media too. The Twitter layout would need the addition of Facebook’s user search bar, and profile pages should have tabs for photos and videos. But the service wouldn’t have to host anything itself – pull statuses out of Twitter, media from everywhere.
Easy…