Why Facebook and Twitter work for me, Friendfeed didn’t and I don’t know yet about Buzz

The rollout of Google Buzz to Gmail users over the last couple of days
has created a lot of noise and with some pundits/web-celebs touting
that it will cause Facebook to “lose half its value.” While I think
Google Buzz has some promise, this initial version has some very big
flaws that mean it just doesn’t work for me the way Twitter and
Facebook do. Given that I’m pretty active on Facebook, Twitter,
Linkedin and with some other services and I’m often asked about
personal social media tools and strategy, I’ll put my $0.02 into the
discussion.

Like any new social media system two of the biggest power users are
the first to jump on — Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis. Both are
smart guys whose comments and observations generate a lot of feedback.
They move the market. However following them on Buzz means your Buzz
“box” (or tab) is filled with all the user comments and feedback. This
isn’t comments from people you know, it’s from the other 4000 people
who are following Scoble. Since Buzz lacks the UI controls for me to
expand and collapse this long comment stream, most of which I don’t
want to read, your Buzz is filled to overflowing. Smaller posts,
tweets, etc from people you follow who don’t command the massive
audience of the big players can get lost in that see of noise.

The other immediate problems I’ve noticed about Buzz are a lot of
double posting — posting to Twitter will get redirected to Buzz and
some people are reposting on Buzz. That’s not a big problem yet but
again it seems to be limited to the celebrities who want to everything
everywhere. There’s also the problem of Buzz comment streams ending up
in your Gmail Inbox. I’m sure this is a “feature” from Google’s
perspective but I don’t want it. I’d rather keep one box for email,
one for blog/tweet/comment flow. (The work around for this “feature”
is to create a Gmail filter for Buzz posts and automatically archive
them)

The version 1.0 user interface issues aside, Scoble called Buzz better
than Friendfeed. Since I was at best a limited user of Friendfeed I’ll
not debate that point, but I will say the debate should be between
Facebook, not Friendfeed, and Buzz.

The best overall “feed” for me is on Facebook. I get more comments on
my blog posts, more feedback about what my post there than I do
directly on my blog, or on Twitter. I don’t think I ever got comments
about posts on Friendfeed, but I can’t make a Foursquare post or
reblog a chart about Microsoft revenue breakdown without getting
feedback from friends and associates from around the world. It’s great
to hear in an email or on a phone call how people like seeing and
following my activity. People read blog posts via the Facebook news
feed that they would have never read on the blog itself or via RSS.

Why is that? To me it’s simple. People on Facebook care about me and
what I have to say. The came to Facebook to see what their friends are
doing. They are friends, they have a connection, even from years ago
to me. They remember me. The 1600 connections on Facebook are
personal. I would say the same thing about connections on Linkedin as
well, though the user interface of that site makes commenting and
responding to activity if not harder, certainly less important.

I am following and being followed by about 2500 people, organizations,
entities, companies, etc on Twitter. Many of them I know well, but the
vast majority are simply names and avatars. Some connections which
began online have developed into offline friendships but too many are
just one sided “conversations” filled with link dumps all trying to up
their SEO game.

My Gmail address book has about 4000 entries. If all of them joined
Buzz, would I follow them? Probably not. I imagine those that I’m not
already connected to on Facebook or Linkedin wouldn’t want to follow
me either. I’m no Scoble.