Author: Thaddeus Preston (Nick Waye)

Over the past couple days I have started to see an slight exodus of hearts and minds from Buzz users as life, its stresses and noise take time away from some folks engaging. I also see more and more of the folks I follow pimp other social networks like Miio, the new social messaging darling, as well. Some followers such as @Alfredo Abambres and @Larry Anderson are toning down their Buzz interactions altogether. The common thread among their reasoning, noise. Google stumbled out of the gate with Buzz and appeared to be getting its groove back, but a strange thing happen on the way to building this Gmail-only echo chamber. The rest of the web caught up and started to seduced the flock. Now I ain’t going anywhere anytime soon because I still find Buzz compelling and engaging, even if the noise is starting to make things a bit unbearable. @Alfredo Abambres and @Larry Anderson both brought valid concerns about trying to wade through the often flood of Google Reader post (I’m guilty of that too) and the constant unsolicited, unidentifiable followers (or Brad Pitt). They haven’t solved that problem obviously. And where is our curation by way of lists or groups?  I can’t do Larry’s blog post justice so check out a more detailed reasoning of why he is cutting back on Buzz.  Poor @Alfredo Abambres missed a vital communicate with one of his flock buried under all the junk. While an @ mention would have solved that problem, the lack of groups is puzzling. I can at least do some kind of curating in Twitter via lists. Hell even the upstart Miio can do this. There is little (or no intuitive) method of segregating groups of friends on Buzz. This is even stranger being that smart people within Google have described this very social norm of having different groups of friends online and offline in real-life (remember that). Paul, are you talking to the Google Buzz team?

This brings me to my overall point about all things “social”.  Social networks are faddish at best and have a tendency to be cliquey like real life. Human beings have a nasty habit of acting out its very nature.  Gone are the days of having the time to get the launch of a new social service right. No you see if you screw the pooch out of the gate and don’t iterate with one update a week your toast. Social platforms are filled with the fickle that want it to work now. Buzz was sticky at first then it became work for most of us. A constant stream of moving comments that make it hard to keep up (and I hate it when I am making a damn comment and the stream updates). As the amount of people increase their presence on Buzz the noise (and spam) increases are directly proportional. Lost in the stream were relevant comments of some importance that we don’t necessarily get in our inbox. Maybe this is simply a growing pain of an infant service. Maybe it’s early adopter leaving for something new perhaps. If the Google Buzz team doesn’t start addressing the noise issue soon you will see a lot more Alfredo’s and Larry’s leaving the service.

This week is the premiere of the audio edition of my randomness.

Last night I had beta-testing session with some fellow Google Buzzers of Wavelook. It’s a Microsoft Outlook plugin that bring the power of Google Wave to the inbox, something Google has yet to do in a meaningful way. Side note: I have been told via unofficial Google channels that my Holy Trinity (a Wave, Buzz and Gmail nexus) is in the works. In the meanwhile, the expandability of the API’s have given enterprising developers the ability to build a better Wave interface.

Wavelook is pretty easy to installed and while I hate Outlook I felt it was duty to endure for the sake of beta-testing. I was accompanied by @Tom Awtry and @Alfredo Abambres in this experiment and I have to say it was pretty phenomenal. Once installed simply add a Wave account as an inbox or as part of a unified inbox. Wavelook has the all to familiar Outlook look and fell. I found it actually not as easy to use at first as Wave (which is a testament to the learning curve) and waves with lots of blips looked just as messy and confusing as they do in the Google Wave client.

However, as new waves came in or as waves got updated I could see them go bold in the inbox. It felt very comfortable like how email should be. When at work, I get emails from people all the time and occasionally I would like to strike up a chat session. That use case became very apparent as I messed around with this. With the waves themselves I can see real-time typing as I interacted with all the participants. I could even see attachments other wave participants post, although I could not attach any files from Outlook. I have been promised by Wavelook’s developers themselves that the feature is coming soon.  And developer relations is top notch with someone named Matt promising to be at our beck and call if we have any issues.

Now for those of you that still hate wave this may not be a big deal, but for the rest of us wave fanatics this may start moving the use of wave to the main stream. There are still people that use desktop email clients (I know those people are weird). Lots of corporate IT enterprises use Outlook religiously. If wave federation starts becoming a reality this might be the familiar front end that boosts wave adoption, possibly in the enterprise. Or maybe I just a dreamer? Either way this blast from the past has me bullish again on wave.

Free writing today so bear with me because I wanted to write about the first thing to come to mind. What about? Facebook. Facebook hitting a half a billion people is a milestone to be admired and feared all at the same time. First, to the team at Facebbok congratulations. This is a hell of a achievement for such a short period of time and gives all aspiring internet entrepreneur hope that great companies that change the world can still be built in America. Hell in this economy can still be built at all. When you think of the shear size of Facebook being larger than the entire population of the U.S., one can’t help but to marvel. Facebook is poised to change the world when it starts to make serious moves into India, China and Africa. Ways even Google could only hope to do. On my trip to Nigeria, all my sisters and cousins asked if I was on Facebook. I have my reasons for not joining, but there is increasing social pressure to do so. And that is the power of Facebook (and to a certain extent Twitter) has had on the social norms of our modern digital age. A tectonic cultural shift that transcends tech. Now the hyperlinks that connect the worlds information are being augmented by the likes, dislikes and associations we share. We are now connected more meta-physically than physically.

For all the greatness of this achievement there is a dark side to one service being such a monolith. Facebook is not a truly open platform to begin with. It has played the pidepoiper to get a half-billion people and ogranizations to join up then share their data Search engines can’t crawl it. Its Javascript snippets pollute the web through open graph and likes. I understand the overall strategy for world dominations through the human powered algorithm of ‘likes’. But I am not one who has drunk the kool-aide that the future of search is this but perhaps a supplement to the future semantic dataspaces I envision. Then there are survey’s that customer satisfactions with Facebook ranks no higher than dealing with your cable company or the IRS. So what is Facebook planning on doing with 500 million citizens and counting? Sell ads and their data of course. What Facebook has relalized since its idealism phase is that there is more value in takings that closed network and opening it than keeping it some exclusive club for college grads. Besides that, what other value add is Facebook to mankind? Simply connecting people over a game of Farmville? Not exactly. See I believe Facebook is not only in the race to be the ID card of the web but that human crawlers of information will be the future of discovery. It’s relevancy based on personal relationships with your Dunbar circle of friends. This at best is a short term, if not short sighted, vision. For Facebooks next trick they had better start offering some utility to it huge user base. I mean what can Facebook do on a daily basis to make you productive? Friends and liesure are one thing, but most of our waking hours of the day are spent working, not playing games and sharing stories. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Apple do that for us. I use tools from three of the four everyday to get things done. These companies offer some social, but mostly utility. So Facebook needs to get into the game of offering the same things that we take for granted from these other services. Email (to the outside word), chat, docs, News and other essential services that make Facebook more than just a place to play, but to work.

This is only some friendly words of advice and by no means should they take it, I haven’t built a 500 million strong global community so I have no room to talk. I do believe that with this great power comes great opportunity to become more than just the heir apparent to MySpace. The next worry from Zuck and company is staying relevant in a fickle popularity contest that is everything “Social”. Remember Friendster.