Sharing. It’s what we’re all about these days. New? Hardly. But where we used to share without talking about sharing, we spend more time expressing our desire to share than we, well, share.
Such a shame. All that time spend on vapid activity rather than committing to action itself.
And just when the buzz about Twitter had started to bottom out, Twitter is all about Buzz.
Google Buzz. Can you hear the faint flutter of wings on prayers?
I’m a spectacularly open-minded kind of geek, despite what you might already think. I’m prepared to buzz around Buzz like a moth to a blazing bulb.
It wasn’t a big job to unwrap it. “Would you like to Buzz?” went the auto-invitation, echoing memories of sitting in doctors’ waiting rooms waiting for the klaxon to sound for a date with destiny.
First time, it was a hollow gesture. Click, clunk, nothing. Gmail as it was last month, last year. A premature proposition.
The second time was barely more intriguing, although by now the Buzz icon had implanted itself squarely betwixt Inbox and Sent Mail on signing into the Gmail interface.
“Share content, start conversations,” blurts Google. Wow – this is what we’ve all been waiting for! Why didn’t someone else figure this out? Why is it 2006 all over again?
Mashable claims 50% of Twitter users dislike Buzz or have ‘already done with it’. Most, I suspect, haven’t even bothered to switch it on…
There are legion anti-climactic moments in the life of a man. Growing a beard, fixing the toilet.
Buzz felt like waking up with stubble. You’d seen it before, thousands of times. In a cloak known as Twitter. Only Twitter isn’t so cumbersome. Twitter is HTML5 to Buzz’s Flash.
It feels all so… Google Wave. Lonely as a cloud. Like the UK servers after a hacked copy of Gotham Racing invaded a friend’s Playstation pre-release.
There are a few people hanging around. A few people kicking the tyres. Ooh, I can link something! Hey, look, I can type something and IT APPEARS ON MY SCREEN!
It’s a contentious perspective. Or is it? To me, Google has arrived way too late to the party.
While Facebook continues on its inexorable rise to becoming The Web, Google has dropped its HUD.
Wave flails, drowning. Steve Jobs makes a derisory private/public statement about the search titan. Microsoft, the soft and cuddly bear of tech so often these days, prepares to release Windows Mobile 7, which could crush the phone fortunes of both these companies.
There’s something distinctly derogatory about the moniker flying around for Buzz users. Buzzards, buzzing off.
It’s been quite a month for undersights. First, angry Jobs unleashes the iPad in a less than sanitary climate. Its industrial design has great bodyform. Now there’s Buzzards.
And in the fastest-moving geek scene ever known, Buzz still feels so… kneejerk.
I’ll caveat everything I just said. It’s early days. Buzz could be amazing.
But I think someone just switched off the lights.

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