I wonder if, when a company crosses a threshold we all think violates a Nash equilibrium, we start to oppose the company. With this move, Google is declaring war on a host of web companies that are heretofore thriving and collaborating and making tons of money.
Every dollar of advertising that Facebook makes is a dollar or even more from Google. Every minute that facebookers facebook, google isn't showing them ads and isn't getting click throughs and this amounts to a vastly larger sum of money than any new search engine or aggregator or individual media company which google has already rendered moot to a large extent.
This is real time search which everyone has been asking for with all the data stored on google's super voluminous uber-fast lightning machine with its neurons and axons keeping the world connected and communicating.
Here it is and we don't want it.
The competition is for virtual real estate. Everywhere there is blank space on the screen or blank time in the consumer day or a blank wall in the virtual world, there will be an ad on it, just as today there are ads in nearly every physical space: Public transportation, Bar room mirrors, big screen tvs... Nothing is safe. No one is safe from Google and they have crossed the nash equilibrium where everyone is competing against them, including the websites where they get their content and the websites where people go to pass time.
> I wonder if, when a company crosses a threshold we all think violates a Nash equilibrium, we start to oppose the company.
Do you mean "we, the people" or "we, the people who think in terms of Nash equilibria"? ;)
More seriously: I don't think I care about how big the company is. Rather, I care about the quality of the product, and whether I am free to leave it for a competitor's product. Google is actually trying to make it easy for you to leave if you choose to, and take your data with you - they're even inviting you to report their failures in that regard at www.dataliberation.org - so that's quite good.
If they don't make it easy for me to interact with Facebookers/Twitterers/whateverers, I'll end up visiting Facebook/Twitter/whatever instead, and vice versa - what's wrong with that? I'm not an economist, but this sounds like a healthy competitive landscape to me?
> Do you mean "we, the people" or "we, the people who think in terms of Nash equilibria"? ;)
The latter, of course. WE ARE A NEW PEOPLE! WE WILL PREVAIL!
More seriously, I don't care about how big the company is either, as such -- but I do worry about a company that gets so big and so diversified that it may become anticompetitive and stifle innovation. Remember when Microsoft had the power to hold back innovation, and we were stuck with IE6 for years and years? Didn't that just suck?
Google is being a lot better about this, mind you. They seem to genuinely care about interoperability and making it possible for competitors to beat them by being better. And they've got good products and smart people and a non-broken management structure. I feel good about Google. Nevertheless, a Google-dominated web is something to worry about. I hope that there are always viable alternatives. Not because I think Google is evil and corrupt, but because I worry that they could become so.
>> With this move, Google is declaring war on a host of web companies that are heretofore thriving and collaborating and making tons of money.
From the perspective of those other companies they are indeed "declaring war" and it's all very dramatic... but for actual users, this is just another company competing for their attention by providing a better service.
I expect the product will fail because Google sucks at social stuff, but in principle more competition is good, and unless a company competes unfairly through a monopoly (and they don't have one for email or social networking.)
One thing that just struck me, is that google/gmail will not be banned from workplace computers as often as fb/twitter have been. This alone will be a significant advantage.
I think in most corporates (outside the software industry) it's the other way around. I can't access gmail/hotmail but can access social networks at work (in finance).
I've asked a couple of friends with corporate jobs, and they said Gmail is usually open but FB is blocked. They also said it doesn't matter, because everyone has a smartphone.
Not a great data point, but interesting none the less.
My impression has been the opposite, that facebook/myspace/etc are blocked more than webmail. The only recent survey I could find that touched on both social neworking and webmail is this one from august:
Doing consulting in insurance companies, I can tell you Facebook have been banned for a long time, and twitter more recently. As an outside consultant I have gmail, but the employees sometimes don't have it.
I work in a big insurance corp, Facebook not banned there, but twitter and friendfeed were blocked after they appeared on tv or made the news by getting bought for millions. Blocking remains arbitrary and ineffective as about 2/3rds have iphones or similar. RSS remains the way round all the muscle flexing of IT depts, I'm amazed it hasn't been understood mor
I'm guessing the reason RSS isn't cracked down on more is because not enough people are using it. That makes cracking down on it not worth the trouble.
i've mostly seen similar, though they tend to block webmail and social networking sites. data leakage through people sending out confidential documents via webmail is a real concern for big business.
I've been fortunate enough to never have been employed at a company where the employer things its good practice to ban certain websites. How common is this? What field do you work in?
Thankfully in academia things are very relaxed. I just thought of a friend who has this problem and then I realised I know at least 2-3 people in office jobs who have similar issues. I'm in the UK btw.
Is Google becoming the new Microsoft? Not in the evil sense, but in the lame me-too products that rely on brute force (their huge install base) and no innovation to hopelessly try to compete sense.
Google has always been this way as far as I can tell. They're basically using Microsoft's old strategy of "clone it and give it away so we can sell more of Windows" only with Google it's ads.
The difference is everyone still loves them. Microsoft was seen as ruthlessly destroying their competition. Google is seen as innovative. Bizarre.
Depends. GMail was fundamentally innovative - do you remember what webmail was like before it launched? GMail gave us a gig of storage and Google search over your inbox and threaded conversation view and keyboard shortcuts and a UI that didn't require page refreshes between each message.
Similarly, Maps was fundamentally innovative. If you went to GMaps c. 2005 and then went to MapQuest, there was absolutely no comparison. I kept wanting to drag the map around to see what was just offscreen. And then Maps kept innovating with satellite imagery, and Street View, and local business labels on the satellite imagery, and double-click-to-find-the-best-vantage-point.
Then there are a bunch of me-too products that succeed only because its Google and everyone already uses them.
Unfortunately this includes everything I've done at Google, but I'm hoping they've set things up for future innovation. Real innovation takes time, usually 3-4 years. Google's strength has been that they're willing to devote that time, but you can't have every single product out the door be a hit.
I'm afraid I don't agree with your use of the term "innovative". Regarding Gmail, I'd rather say they managed to clone mutt+procmail for the web in a reasonable manner.
Regarding Maps, the fundamental operations had been in place since at least 2002 at e.g. http://www.nl.map24.com/. Actually I haven't been there for quite some time, and I think in 2002 their interface was actually better than now.
We'll just have to agree to disagree then, because I don't see how anyone could look at mutt+procmail vs. GMail and say GMail wasn't innovative, or at nl.map24.com and say GMaps wasn't innovative. Both of those seem ridiculously hard to use by today's standards.
Microsoft was seen as ruthlessly destroying their competition. Google is seen as innovative. Bizarre.
Google gives away a ton of free services that work. Microsoft sells people something that they have (almost) no option not to buy, and causes a near infinite stream of headaches to just about everyone (even if you don't use it yourself - how many times have you had to help out friends or relatives whose Windows installations got screwed up?).
Sure, giving stuff away may be a cheap ploy to earn goodwill, but I can truly say that Google's services have provided me with a lot of value. In the old days of Microsoft that was true for them, too, but over the past decade Microsoft products have done little more than cost me time and money.
Is it really that bizarre that I feel differently about the two companies?
even if you don't use it yourself - how many times have you had to help out friends or relatives whose Windows installations got screwed up?
Actually never... but anyway.
Sure, giving stuff away may be a cheap ploy to earn goodwill
But it's not a cheap ploy. It's a destroyer of value. Once Google moves into a market it's impossible to compete against them (same used to be true of Microsoft and still is in markets they're dominant in..)
My point is that as a community of people interested in startups/founders one would think Hacker News would be upset by this but everyone seems to celebrate when Google moves into a market and destroys it with free.
Is it really that bizarre that I feel differently about the two companies?
i don't really see how you can complain about someone doing a good job at providing a valuable service to users. if they do a bad job, i can compete - if they don't, i can't add value.
it's not like we're gonna run out of problems to solve, because google is solving all of them for us.
You don't? You're on this site so I imagine you dream of having your own start up some day, no? How would you like it if every single idea you have ends up with you working it to 80% completion only to have Google release a free version of it. Every time. Not freemium, not pay-as-you-go. Totally free. Would you like that?
If you say yes then I think you need to take a step back and consider the possibility that you've been brain washed.
Open-source has created more clones than any single company, and it keeps on cloning. And yet software companies that actually provide value aren't going out of business any time soon.
If Google really starts cloning everything, the way Microsoft is trying, they'll start losing the focus on their core values. As a result, their products will be inferior ... their resources are limited after-all.
Don't believe me? They have a social network for quite some time ... see http://www.orkut.com ... do you see it competing against Facebook? They also have a Wikipedia competitor ... knol.google.com ... do you see it overtaking Wikipedia?
But I do remember what my online-life was like before Google Search / GMail / Google Maps ... I used AltaVista and the first page of results was always full of junk. I used Yahoo Mail that had a slow interface, and only something like ~ 50 MB of storage ... I still have that account (using it for YIM) and it's practically unusable (their spam filters are crap ... in contrast with 2 GMail accounts + 2 Google Apps accounts that are doing just fine).
Google Apps is also really valuable ... I can have my email setup for my domain in a couple of hours, for free, having all the goodies of GMail.
I'm also using Google Translate ... which is really kick-ass sometimes (I'm not a native English speaker, and my native language isn't really popular, but Google Translate knows about it ;))
I'm also using Google Docs and Google Calendar ... Docs because it's there (came with Google Apps) and Calendar because it is intuitive and it is sending me SMS messages for free, plus my wife can see my schedule without me having to give her my password :)
Android and Chrome are 2 products launched to increase competition. I'm a Firefox user, but Chrome is so fast and so stable that it leaves Firefox in the dust ... I'd use it, but some Firefox-specific features are missing. And Android is the open-source mobile-OS we needed ... polished, backed by a strong brand, with a good SDK, and online-store.
I don't really think it's debatable whether Google provides value or not ... they clearly do. And what's "innovation" anyway?
Of course you're not going to see revolutionary ideas. That's why patents are so absurd.
But if you're fear-mongering about freebies, it means you're not providing enough value to justify your sales.
>Open-source has created more clones than any single company, and it keeps on cloning.
Well, it takes more than simply dumping a free product on the market. It has to be comparably usable.
>do you see it competing against Facebook?
Facebook is also free.
>They also have a Wikipedia competitor ... knol.google.com ... do you see it overtaking Wikipedia?
Again. Two free products competing with each other.
>But I do remember what my online-life was like before Google Search / GMail / Google Maps
People and companies are not static. Yes, google did a lot of good things for us (as did MS and various other places before them). No, they wont continue to do so forever.
><snip a bunch of stuff about using google for most everything>
This seems to back up my point. You're using all these free things instead of buying something from an aspiring new start up.
>I don't really think it's debatable whether Google provides value or not ... they clearly do.
Perhaps, but it's not a zero sum game. Them providing valuable services for free means that I will have a much harder time making a start up to provide those things for even a small cost.
>But if you're fear-mongering about freebies, it means you're not providing enough value to justify your sales.
With google the threat is two fold: a huge company with vastly more resources than any start up will have who gives away most of their stuff for free.
Open source software is frequently a clone of commercial software and free. If that were enough to be "evil" then everything would be evil. Nobody is claiming that Google is innovative in this example.
It's better than Twitter and FF because the messages can be larger. Images and videos look better. You can see a conversation inline. etc.
It's taking the best of the Twitter ecosystem, Twitter, Friendfeed and putting it into Google's social graph. It's innovative with the combination of features they've chosen to employ, but it's not original, though. Search was never new when Google started either, remember.
-- edit: I am going to use Buzz to start blogging again. Instant viewer base, who I can identify.
Just as a nitpick: "the messages can be larger" is an anti-feature for me, and for many others that use Twitter. Inline images and videos is one thing, of course, but if longer messages was a feature then blogging would have defeated Twitter before it launched.
Most people can't figure out RSS readers, and twitter lets you read and write in the same interface. Everything else about twitter is an anti-feature, including the post length limit.
You can say a lot on 140 chars, also if something's junk you know quickly to not read it. It also doesn't take a lot of screen room, thus there's a lot of data available without a scroll down.
It would be interesting to have a 140, 700, 5000, unlimited character filters in Buzz. If its display algorithm was used well, it could work out if long posts from a particular person were usually not worth reading to most people.
Most true open source software doesn't have the launch pad of GMail either. Besides that, the fact that the open source community clones software and gives it away is just as sad. Open sourcing something doesn't make it pure.
If that were enough to be "evil" then everything would be evil.
I don't care if Google is evil. They're a large corporation trying to make money like any other. They don't care about us.
* Nobody is claiming that Google is innovative in this example.*
My point was that the vast majority of Google's products are clones and yet they're still considered innovative where the same is true of Microsoft and they are not thought of that way.
They may not have invented web-based maps and email, but the functionality of Google Maps was leaps and bounds better than anything else out there. Before Google Maps, you had to click and reload to move around or zoom. Similarly, while there were web-based email providers out there, none of them approached webmail the way Gmail did. Abandoning folders for tags and search? What webmail system was that a clone of?
I'm pretty sure you don't remember using web-based maps before Google Maps. They had no AJAX.
Perhaps you attach some other meaning to "clone" than an exact genetic duplicate, indistinguishable from the original except for gestational differences?
And what I'm supposed to do with the source code? Relaunch it as another product and try and compete with Google? Free source code is the oldest trick in Google's book, it amazes me people still fall for it.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know of an example of a successful startup whose products are based on source code from Google?
Would you rather just have documentation of APIs? Having the source code is better than not, at least it gives people the option to expand/correct/port anything if they wish to.
Would you consider Linux a successful open source project? I imagine the greatest impact has not been people relaunching "Linux Pro", but people who have built off of it.
I'm curious if Silverlight or VS actually caused any Windows sales. IE too, really; would someone who's not already running Windows actually switch to it for IE? Seriously?
But point taken; that it worked (or not) doesn't negate the fact it was done. Thanks!
They used to give away free copies of MS Office at Military conventions to senior personnel. The idea was that those people would start using the new default formats and others would be required to buy upgrades. It worked quite frequently that I know of.
I really liked Chris Dixon's post "What's strategic for Google?" from a while back: http://cdixon.org/2009/12/30/whats-strategic-for-google/
... following his line of thinking, this may be a lame me-too product, but they _have_ to run it anyway: if they allow Facebook to move a lot of user-hours away from the internet to what is really a big intranet, that would kill Google's revenue.
Right, so the interesting twist in Google's story is that because of their dominance in the open web it is in their interest to protect the open nature of the web, rather than lock users into another walled garden. That's pretty cool, and I think they've been very smart to position themselves that way. It's still surprising how they completely fail to innovate in some areas, though.
And how much I personally use this will hinge fully on how well they do on making this as open as possible. If this has a solid API, and it's easy for an ecosystem of associated tools to grow around this, then I'll probably end up using it a good bit.
Yes, that's exactly how I think we should look at this. The open web is full of AdSense-junkies, while on Facebook they won't have it.
I'm not sure I agree that there's lack of innovation at Google; I'm trying to think of a big company that does any better in that regard and can't think of any.
Argh what is the point of comments like these? It is totally drowning out any useful discussion about the actual merits or demerits of the product. The iPod was a lame "me-too" product, eh?
I actually thought his comment was moderately insightful (ie: it's not totally original, but in the context of the hype around Buzz, it's a question worth pondering).
The iPod was not a me-too product. It was the first digital music player that took a more comprehensive approach to solving the problem around finding/getting music content from the "cloud" (back when "the cloud" was just simply called the interwebs) to your player. When the iPod first launched, many people did not initially look any deeper then the surface.
Perhaps once we look past the surface of Buzz, we'll see that it brings something to the table that has been missing in social status sites. Or, perhaps Buzz is Google's Zune.
Actually the same can be said of your answer :-/ That the iPod was a me-too product is an interesting comment, because it reminds us to look at what was special about it (beautiful design, tight integration with the desktop and media store). What's special about Buzz?
That last sentence is the right question. If you think about _that_ for a few minutes instead, you will certainly come up with some arguments (positive or negative); but just saying "is G the next M?" is negative-content, really.
- tight email / reader integration, of course. For non-geeks, one communication center is enough, and GMail is the right place: most won't setup a combined IM + Mail + Twitter + FB + RSS desktop tool.
- lower barrier to entry: many people don't consider they have enough interesting things to say to make it worth creating a twitter account. They would more easily buzz it, since it's there in their mail account.
I have lots of friends that are regular users, sending crappy content to each other via email ... like funny clips and stupid jokes. They don't even use BCC or a mail-list so it's not uncommon to see an email sent to 40 addresses at once, all there in the "To" header :)
When the iPod debuted it only worked on a small percentage of the world's computers and had no media store. It grew into a winner, but the first gen wasn't particularly special.
The first-gen iPod had Firewire (instead of pre-2.0 USB), the scroll wheel (vs. button-only interfaces), and it actually fit in a shirt pocket (vs. the Jukebox which was the size of a portable CD player).
From the looks of it, Google has integrated Buzz into their existing products (gmail, maps, places) that makes it more than just a me-too product. Specifically, a big advantage is in the way Buzz integrates with Gmail - it's brilliant.
Compare how you would reply to an email notification from Facebook or Twitter: you'd have to login to the site and post your reply (or even see the actual reply) there. With Buzz, it's inline.
Which assumes people don't move to Facebook email.
Migration of my friends to FB email seems far more
likely to me than migration of all my social graph to Google Buzz.
It would also be trivial for FB to allow response to notifications via external email if they decide to do it.
I think people are seriously underestimating the value of Facebook's existing graphs. They've been shaped over a couple of years now to what most people want them to be. The vast majority are not going to leave that behind for a me-too service.
You make a good point. I personally don't use FB too much, and don't see myself migrating, but I can see a lot of my friends who use FB possibly making the move.
For me, I use several of Google's products daily, and always have my Gmail open. That's why I like Buzz, because it seems like it fits me well.
What do you see happening to twitter then, if people move to FB mail, in addition to the introduction of Buzz?
Totally agree... rather than shipping a stand alone product and dragging along users to use them, they simply integrated a new product into a very successful one. Plus, the new product fits perfectly.
My thoughts exactly. They could have almost introduced as a new feature instead of a new product, like how they've been adding more integrated support for YouTube sharing in GChat and Mail.
A lot of this was elegantly* evolutionary, but it's nice to see them put a name and publicity push behind it.
It's not enough to copy a product to get the anger. You have to achieve dominance and then stagnate. Take Google Reader for example. When it started out, Bloglines was the superior web reader. Over time and through innumerable upgrades, GR developed a fundamentally superior product.
Also, Google's thing has literally always been to launch half baked ideas, get reaction, and then iterate. All the while never charging anyone except for the eyeballs.
I think they also are probably releasing products in order to confuse competitors and developers. Joel on Software calls this "Fire and Motion" when Microsoft used to do it. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
Actually, Google more resemble Sun Microsystems to me: 1 revenue generating product (search with ads as, as opposed to servers) and then building an eco-system around it to support it (by using open standards.))
I think Sun's revenues also came from Software and Services, but mostly servers. We all know what happen to Sun. I don't know where Google can find its next cash cow.
Microsoft's business strategy has always been a kind of unfocused. They didn't ever sit down and say DOS or BASIC or Word was going to be the cornerstone of their business, they just did what they thought would be useful at the time until they managed to hit on something. You can tell because, though I can't say anything for their old BASIC's, DOS wasn't even very good! As Microsoft got big enough to parallelize this strategy, it turned into a kind of shotgun strategy where they simultaneously tried to build web browsers and gaming consoles and mobile phone operating systems and MP3 players and webmail and everything else. If you read The Road Ahead, Bill Gates writes about Wang, which was enormously successful but missed the PC wave just long enough to go out of business. After Microsoft's own close call with the internet (ironically around the time The Road Ahead was written and first published), I'm sure these fears intensified to the point where Microsoft started jumping after every hot new thing, be it multitouch, MP3 players, search engines, or whatnot.
The contrast to this is Apple in the respective Jobs eras, which focused intensely on building a few great products. It's a far riskier strategy--if Apple invents the Macintosh and no one wants one, what then?
Google's had a shotgun approach as well--I don't know why, but it seems like a good use of the talent they seem so intent on recruiting. Part of the shotgun approach is that some products are better than others, but a likely bad part of the approach is that you are prone to go chasing after every new trend.
I wish we could see more evidence of this talent in their products.
It seems like their "shot-gun" approach is to release a lot a half-baked crap just to generate some headlines and then hope people forget about it (e.g. Wave). I think this used to work when they were competing with Microsoft (which also released half-baked crap but for got called on it.. constantly). But now I think a lot of companies are releasing good products right out of the gate (e.g. Apple, Facebook) and this strategy is going to be less successful in the future.
Microsoft started off with an unpopular operating system, and forced it down users' throats by tying up with the hardware manufacturers. Users don't have much of a choice in the matter. I think they lost contact with their end users at some point. Today, they're stuck with the NIH syndrome, and keep running around in circles, without making an effort to understand the way the market/ competition has changed.
Google started off making good useful (and I'd say innovative) products like Google Search and GMail. They got their users to like them and focused heavily on keeping up with their customers' wants. They post pictures of their office, and talk about their "cool" work culture, and manage to get the public drooling all over. Microsoft didn't think any of this was important. At some point, Google will probably start becoming a sloppy uninteresting company that forces new products down their existing customers' throats. Still, a smarter successor.
Google is a better MS in the same way that MS was a better IBM. And for me personally Google is synonomous with NIH. I mean, a search/ads company making their own Phone? Operating system??? Router?!
The difference is that I still don't really get what Wave's about, and I think a lot of folks agree. I still remember the first time I saw Google Maps--I got it instantly, and I was blown away. And the intial value proposition of Gmail (a gig of storage) was obvious too.
That's what I never got about Wave - that they didn't somehow integrate it with Gmail, not even loosely.
After I got a Wave account I invited a couple of friends, and they checked it out - signing in once, and forgetting about the whole service after that. So I tried including them in a few "waves", but there was no option to get email notifications of new waves! Of course they never returned, and the next time 'round I'd just email them again...
I've been thinking that they should initially roll WAVE out as plumbing.
They could transplant GMail/Buzz/Google Talk/etc to run on Wave without forcing people to learn the interface up-front. Users would be building up content 'in' Wave and Google would be slowly integrating the features that Wave makes easy.
Then the Wave interface (the biggest stumbling block for most) can be introduced as an optional power-user interface; but wholly compatible in case people want to bounce back and forth as they ease in and backward-compatible with people who aren't ready to take the plunge. (fully backward compatible, in the case of other GMail users)
In response to a question at the press conference, they said the UI was "inspired by Wave." (Similarly, they said that it was not connected to Google Latitude now, but "over the next year" they hope to bring them closer together.)
Wow. Lookout lots of web companies. You're wallowing along in the middle of the road and this huge truck is barreling down on you at 100 kph. The truck's name is Google.
For the less metaphorically-inclined, Google has so much money and is doing so much development that they've reached the point that they are actively trying to obsolete hundreds of companies. You can certainly argue that perhaps these companies deserve to be replaced. Google is becoming the Wal-Mart of the web.
My point is that they have so many resources and so much raw computing power on the line that almost by accident they can burn to rubble dozens of different business models.
Overall some consolidation is probably a good thing, but I am continuously reminded of WalMart. WalMart perfected retail sales in much the same way as Google is perfecting rich internet applications. WalMart was able to deliver products cheaper than anybody else. Google in many cases just gives stuff away. WalMart drove out lots of small shops. Google seems to be doing the same. WalMart had a goal of dominating the market. Google wants to store every piece of data on the planet.
I'm perfectly happy shopping at WalMart -- they do a great job of providing me stuff at the best prices I can find. I'm not so convinced that I am as happy getting all of my internet data from Google. I'm NOT saying they're some kind of evil empire, just I'm beginning to feel more and more uncomfortable about them. It looks like whatever is the flavor of the week there's Google out there peddling their version of it.
I wonder if Google's API docs on the whole are too comprehensive. Most people just want to get to the meat fast, and then consume it. Twitter's API doc is one page.
When I go to buzz.google.com from an Android phone I get redirected to a Mobile Help page listing the supported phones. Is this happening to anyone else?
[edit]
It looks like only Android 2.0+ is supported and the HTC Hero still runs 1.5. Lame.
If you use the mobile UI and have someone comment on your post, it will send the thread to your inbox. Trying to reply to that thread will then force-update your gmail to include Buzz (or at least, it worked for me.)
Yes that could be it, but I can tell you in new cities incentives are not big. When I see Buzz with Google Local Listings (with coupons), and place page I feel like I will not be using Foursquare that much. I'm probably wrong though, I was excited about Wave too.
I find it very odd that they depict the iPhone on top of the N1. To me, that conveys a position of higher status for Google's competitor and that doesn't make much sense.
There are many, many more iPhones and iPod Touches out there than there are Nexus Ones. Google wants as many people as possible to be using this, so they're showing these people that it will work with their devices.
They'll save the 'superior device' angle for other features where the size of the user base is less important (GPS Navigation).
Accessing http://m.google.com/app/buzz from an iPhone works whether or not you see the buzz label in gmail. You can use Firefox with the "User-Agent Switcher" add-on set on iPhone to try it out.
What I don't understand is how people seem to be okay with Buzz being built into gmail. Don't we have enough of social networks that steal our time? Now we have one in or inbox? Not super excited about that fact.
I understand you will be able to turn it off, just like you can logout from Facebook. That's not the issue. It's the idea of creating something of this kind in a "holy place" like your inbox.
Thought it was a little funny to see that http://buzz.com/ seems to be a similar unlaunched service from AT&T with the same name.
It seems they've managed to roll up what a lot of others were doing into a seemly nicely integrated package. I would like to think that this will give location based networks the push they need to become more mainstream.
G1 won't run it, needs Android 2.0+
I guess it's good that they're not letting old platforms slow down development, but FFS, a bit over a year and the G1 can't run any of the new stuff. They should never have sold it with such weak hardware...
Still waiting on an 850 Nexus :(
I like Buzz after using it a bit more on my iTouch (still not available on my computer yet ... :/ ). Still trying to decide if I like Buzz better than Foursquare. It's really fun checking in and competing with your friends, but if you don't live in a populated area like myself, there seems to be not as much interaction. When I signed on with Buzz, there were already people interacting. Sharing tips about restaurants, what they were doing for the day, how they liked Buzz, and etc. Both are definitely fun though! Anyone get to use it on their PC? How is it??
I'm going to reserve final judgement until I actually get a chance to use the service and see the direction Google wants to take it. My first reaction is not positive. This feels like Google's Microsoft Money moment Go into a market with an established leader, use your size and dominance to undermine the competition just because you're the 800lbs gorilla and you need to be fed at any cost. There doesn't appear to be anything new here. Just a Google logo.
Have you looked at the Geo features? The integration with several existing services? Of course it is not a new idea, but to say "just a Google logo" does a great disservice to the team who've been working hard on this project.
No, I haven't got it yet. That's why I'm reserving judgement of the actual service until I can use it. Google's engineers are fantastic and I'm sure it's a good service. My concerns are purely on the business/competitive side.
Now who in here will be the first to develop a slick dedicated Windows desktop sidebar client for this, or an Outlook plugin?
If it was a Microsoft product, it would probably run right on the desktop in a sidebar. Then they would have a developers conference for it in Las Vegas with a free brunch too. [A different promotional stratagy than Google].
I find that the Buzz interface is highly similar to Brizzly which was similar to Gmail developed by ex-Googlers working on Gmail/Google Reader. Its like all deja vu. O God I'm so buzzed out!
I think this is basically location aware microblogging. This might be pretty disruptive in the space with the integration and the ease of use. Also, auto discovery is done pretty well.
Google is the new Microsoft in one sense: if they say or announce anything, geeks will spend more time talking about how they hate/fear/distrust Google than about the product.
Does anyone know if it works through Maps on Android 1.6? I just got the update on my G1 and posted an update through Maps, but it doesn't seem to show up on the Buzz layer.
It's try to buy, and if that fails, try to compete. At Google's size, it would be very, very, very difficult to spread their peanut butter too thin, and their Superbowl Ad indicates that they are focusing on what everyone knows them best for and only dipping their feet into other pools that they can't buy into.
Ok, listen up, HN. I love this community because you're smart and ambitious, but we need to have a talk.
The Winter Olympics (& World Cup) are coming up. If we're lucky and live beyond our life expectancy, it's one of maybe 20 we could possibly see. 20. That's how short life is.
A long time ago I was getting into film direction and saw a contest in town for 8mm film shorts. So I wrote a screenplay, gathered eight of my friends together, and in one long day, we shot it. Weeks later when it came back from the labs, I took it to a guy I knew (who was also involved in putting the contest on) who had a projector. I was so excited. I was so proud of what I had done. I began rehearsing, in my mind, answers to such questions as, "How did you achieve such genius with so little background in film?", "What was your inspiration?", etc. The projector spun the film; I held my breath. We couldn't see anything; I hadn't used enough light. (In all my books on film direction, lighting an 8mm didn't come up.) The guy said, as he walked me out, "But you had fun making it right?" I took it almost as a taunt. I thought, "Fuck fun. I didn't want fun. I wanted that fucking film to turn out."
So you're on Hacker News because you like technology? That technology is going to be obsolete in at most a few Winter Olympics from now. You're on HN because you have a startup? If you have a great idea and you execute well with a great team... the odds are not even remotely in your favor. Ask anyone in the business. Not even remotely.
Today when I think back, do you know what I remember from that 8mm film I made? How much fun my friends and I had making it. We had a blast. That day is a wonderful, glorious memory. Whether or not the film turned out was always irrelevant.
Everything you think and love and see and know has an expiration date on it. 20 Olympics -- at most -- if you're lucky. And when you're old and smoking that last cigar (because fuck it) and you close your eyes, what will you remember? Do you know? I'll tell you. Not the film. You won't even remember what the film was about. No, you'll remember the day you shot it. "But you had fun making it?" Did you? It can sound like a taunt, but it's not. It's everything. God, be ambitious. Be smart. Good for you. But have fun. Most of all, have fun.
Laugh, HN. Let your hair down. Have sex. Drink wine from the bottle. Dance like madman. Have fun. For the love of God. You have 20 and it's all you'll ever have. Have fun.
Every dollar of advertising that Facebook makes is a dollar or even more from Google. Every minute that facebookers facebook, google isn't showing them ads and isn't getting click throughs and this amounts to a vastly larger sum of money than any new search engine or aggregator or individual media company which google has already rendered moot to a large extent.
This is real time search which everyone has been asking for with all the data stored on google's super voluminous uber-fast lightning machine with its neurons and axons keeping the world connected and communicating.
Here it is and we don't want it.
The competition is for virtual real estate. Everywhere there is blank space on the screen or blank time in the consumer day or a blank wall in the virtual world, there will be an ad on it, just as today there are ads in nearly every physical space: Public transportation, Bar room mirrors, big screen tvs... Nothing is safe. No one is safe from Google and they have crossed the nash equilibrium where everyone is competing against them, including the websites where they get their content and the websites where people go to pass time.