Why Google Buzz ain’t no Twitter

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What makes a revolutionary service? How do you get people to fully embrace your service? How can you make a service expand beyond your wildest dreams… The answer is simple… Make a killer API.

I got access to Google Buzz today. I played with it a little, but IMO, it’s not that special right now. Of course the biggest problem is that I never built up my Google profile and have no connections with my Google contacts. I assume most people are like this since Google has never really broken into the social network arena. Even though I have used Gmail for years, I seem to have very few contacts, which is bizarre to me.

What I do like is that even though the status updates are small, you know that some are full blog posts, videos, images, etc… I always wanted a Twitter that had more information then just the ridiculous 140 characters. With that being said, it does look an awful lot Twitter or FriendFeed, or facebook status updates or… So needless to say, I’m not too excited.

What makes Twitter so special is that they allow 99% of the service get accessed through their API. You can pretty much do anything with the Twitter API except create a new user. This allows people to create their own twitter clients and applications. Most of us will agree that the main Twitter website is sad. The retweet function sucks, the automatic url shortening is poor, and overall hard to follow lots of people, even with lists.

Twitter apps make everything better Tweetdeck makes Twitter useful and recently I found Hootsuite, which seems even better.

Google had to have know that the API is what makes Twitter so powerful, yet they released Buzz with little but a empty shell of an API. They don’t even have an Android app available???

you can access the Google buzz code here.

Sure, eventually there will be many Buzz applications and most blogs will be buzz enabled to deliver real-time pushed content… meaning as soon as you post, it gets Buzzed. That’s really cool, but if you’re like me there have been many times you publish a post then need to edit right away, how will that work?

I’m going to play with it some more now and try to get PubSubHubbub working on my wordpress blogs, and I’m going to continue to try to figure out how to follow people on Buzz, which is probably the most basic thing ever, yet I can’t find out how to do it other then searching for people.