michael owen hill

One of the first things I did on Buzz was to answer the question, posed by Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, of whether Buzz will catch on. While it’s too early to tell if Buzz will go the way of Wave or will earn a loyal following, I doubt it will live up to the hyped moniker of "Facebook killer," and I doubt it will supplant Twitter as the preeminent microblogging service.

Here are the first four reasons that came to mind:

1. Most people are like me, in that I e-mail one group of people, tweet another and facestalk — I mean Facebook — yet another. Sure, there is some overlap, but I don’t need to "network" further with any of those people. I’m already networked with them to the extent that I want to be. I do not need a social mashup "when worlds collide" service. Let me keep my twitterfriends and facequaintances. I’ll use e-mail the way God intended — to talk to my family without having to talk to my family and to let my boss know I’m going to be late for work.

2. People use e-mail in a wholly different way than they consume social media. You check your e-mail; or, more likely, you receive an annoying notification on your phone that lets you know you’ve inherited millions or that you’ve won an iPad. You don’t visit your e-mail. You don’t follow people on e-mail. You certainly can’t — or shouldn’t — use e-mail to stalk former classmates, co-workers you have a crush on, or fauxlebrities. That’s what Twitter and Facebook are for.

3. Wait three seconds until the spammers and the phishers and the Farmville freaks sink their diseased talons into Buzz. I can put up with the static on social networks, at least to a certain extent. I choose to visit them, and it’s the risk I take. But a "social inbox" full of spammy, hammy, oversharing nonsense and "chain letters 2.0" will send me screaming back to Hotmail in a second.

4. Almost every Google product is hideously, hives-inducingly ugly. I mean, come on. Is there a single designer in Mountain View? Were they all killed or rendered blind by some horrible disease? Some engineer back in the ’90s confused the terms "retro-Web geek-chic" and "just plain janky" and nothing has been done about it since. Seriously. Urk.

Ultimately, Buzz is a nice way for Google pretend it isn’t scared witless about Project Titan. Guess what, it is scared. And it probably should be. Titan is the elephant in Google’s parlor at the moment, and we’ll all have to see how this one plays out.