5 reasons why you should kill Buzz

Within a week of launching Google Buzz, I killed it. Despite my love of the threaded commenting, unlimited by character count and the opportunity it presented to discover new and interesting people, I killed it dead. This is why…

Reason #1: The twits made me do it
You know who I mean. Those people who saw a really cool tool for sharing and discussing the golden nuggets they found scattered across the interwebs AND THEN PLUGGED TWITTER INTO IT. As my mum says: “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” If I wanted a social sharing service that aggregated and duplicated Twitter, I’d go to Friendfeed. (Sorry FF, you know it’s true).

Reason #2: Real work does not happen in the Inbox. It doesn’t happen in the Buzz box, either.
There’s no way around this one. To produce anything of worth or value, you need to quit whatever mail app you’re running, hush incoming alerts of all description, forget that you have an internet connection (or seek Freedom), focus and… create. Buzz is yet another distraction to have to avoid. I opted out to lighten that load.

Reason #3: Google Buzz just ain’t pretty. True fact.
Granted, it does the inline media display quite nicely, but then, what web app worth its salt doesn’t? It adds to the flow of the experience and it’s a great timesaving feature to encourage users to linger longer in what is effectively a time-sink. Beyond that, Buzz is just ugly. It takes its design cues from Google Mail, but for me, this creates confusion. For example: the collapsed view is one I normally associated with an extended message thread. I’ve learned from painful experience that in Buzz, those stacked layers just mean more individual buzzes (?) which will invariably turn out to be more Twitter duplication. Even if there is something of value in the stack, I’m happier just ignoring it to avoid the twit factor.

Reason #4: It’s nowhere near as polished as Feedly
For the short time that I used it, the most satisfying aspect of Buzz was how it opened up my network’s Google Reader feeds for sharing and commenting. But I’ve been spoiled by Feedly, the most visually stunning and reader-friendly overlay to Google Reader I have yet to come across. So, sorry Buzz, but you haven’t yet won me over on the RSS front either.

Reason #5: It’s yet another half-baked, half-assed product designed by engineers
As with all Google products, Buzz feels rushed and incomplete. It adds to the plethora of Google-powered services that are not quite ready to be unleased on an audience of millions — as we saw with the initial privacy backlash when Buzz suddenly, and with no warning, made everyone’s private shiz public. Google grew beyond the point of being a student start-up *years* ago, but its products still sometimes feel like they’ve been thrown together by frat boys in between foosball and pizza, with no thought at all given to usability. I don’t like using Google Buzz, so I don’t. Simple as that. Now if I could just summon similar resolve when it came to Facebook…