Google Buzz is like FriendFeed, the social aggregator acquired by Facebook last year and now partially integrated in the Facebook news feed. Actually Google Buzz is exactly like FriendFeed at the difference it is integrated in the most used Webapp of all time: Webmail.
Like Friendfeed you can integrate your other social activities (Twitter, Picasa, Flikr Youtube, Reader, and any other RSS output like your blog). Your Followers can comment on each of your buzz and you received the notification by email. As Buzz is fully integrated to Gmail, you can comment back directly from your inbox. Again like FriendFeed, you can comment and like any buzz, including the ones that are from external sources.
Being fully integrated to Gmail is a double-edged sword, on one side you get an instant fellowship, but on the other side the people who does not have a Gmail account need to follow you on your ugly profile page.
Friendfeed was used only by a bunch of geeks and never had the attention it deserves by the general population to grow beyond its borders. Everyone I knew around me (as early adopter) had a Friendfeed account, but was never using it to track their friends online contributions. And then Friendfeed got acquired by Facebook, making it easier for everyone to integrate their social activities in their Facebook news feed.
The problem I have with Google Buzz is the same I had with FriendFeed. As you are able to aggregate your social activities from other sources, it just becomes another access point to get in touch with my friends. I’m able to follow my friends favourite posts in Google Reader, but they are also integrated in Facebook through FriendFeed and probably push to Twitter by the same service and integrated here in Google Buzz where I follow that same person status that also includes his Twitter account entries. But I follow also that same person Tweets in my Tumblr dashboard. In no time I get bombarded and oversaturated with the same information on different platforms.
What I predict is that, over time, when the buzz will vanish, people will hide the Google Buzz label to follow their friends activity on a single social platform: Facebook, where at least you can filter and curate the duplicate posts from the different sources.
Google will adapt the product to its users base with time like they did with Google Reader and I’m sure a second look could be given at this point.
My geeky friend Fred had succeed to enable the installation of the extensions in the latest release of Chrome for Mac, by installing their latest nightly build (Chromium) and finding a bookmarklet that let you get the full URL to the extension you wish to add, so the install button get activated.
To install the Tracer Chrome extension he’s talking about you will need, unfortunately, to start Chromium from the terminal as a special parameter needs to be included at the start-up to activate the timeline API needed for that extension. Note that only the extensions that required the timeline API will require that procedure.
flemieux:
As everyone much be aware by now, Google Chrome for Mac Beta was released today, as well as the Linux version. So did Chrome extensions, but much to everyone’s chagrin, extensions have not been built in the Mac version of Chrome yet (why?)
At the same time, Google announced the Speed Tracer Chrome Extension today, which aims at identifying and fixing performance problems in web applications. This will be a nice new addition in my web development toolkit arsenal, so I thought I’d give it a try.
Turns out that it requires a bit of trickery to make this work, so here is the lowdown if you want to make this work on MAC OS X:
- Download a Chromium nightly build that supports extensions (mine is 34076).
- All Chrome Extensions will be off limits even in Chromium (the button is disabled to install them). Fortunately, Matt Mastracci, the founder of DotSpots - a nice extension - has created a simple bookmarklet that turns on the “Install” button for any Chrome extension. Thanks!
- After activating the “Install” button, go ahead and install Speed Tracer
- You need to enable the timeline API inside Chromium, and to do so you must use the —enable-extension-timeline-api flag when starting the app. To do so, launch Chromium in command line by typing /Applications/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium —enable-extension-timeline-api
- Voilà! Play nicely with Speed Tracer!
Now, Google, build the extensions inside Chrome for Mac, and we’ll all be happy campers :D
Thanks Fred.
UDAPTE: It looks like the extensions for Chrome Mac Beta should work be the end of the week. Good news and good turn around.
