Why?

Google Buzz has a lot of the hallmarks of Google Wave. It allows you to easily share a message with your friends, or publicly. It allows you to share links and photos easily. It’s got a nice UI and expands well on what the competition, Twitter, provides. However, it’s not as technically cool as Wave. Google Buzz lacks the killer feature of Wave, for me, though I know it’s going to sound incredibly sad – it’s missing the ability to drag and drop pictures from your computer to the internet.

As far as general opinions on Google Buzz go, I like it and think it stands a real chance. If nothing else, it should light some fires under the feet of the Twitter team, which can only be a good thing. Buzz has a few niggles, such alerting me whenever something changes in my stream – but then not highlighting those changes clearly enough on the resulting page, but I’m sure that’ll get sorted quickly enough. Twitter integration is nice, but it’s too slow to be useful – I don’t want to see what people were saying an hour ago.

I’m intrigued how quickly this blog entry will make it into Buzz. This blog is fed to Twitter, pings various sites on posting, and also has PubSubHubBub integrated. The theory is that it should be near-instant.

As soon as I saw this, it reminded me a lot of Google Wave. It strikes me as a way for Google to push a Wave-like service out in a way that users will understand, since many, including me, didn’t have a clue what it was for. I’m hoping that Google have carried over Wave’s best features, like the ability to drag and drop photos from your computer to upload. If they have, I think they will be taking away a key barrier to entry for “normal users” to get started sharing online, as figuring out how to share pictures on Twitter is hardly simple.

The key difference between Buzz and Wave, for me, is that they’re not trying to replace a well established system (i.e. email) with a new protocol. They are trying to compete with the current “trendy” site, perhaps thinking a little too much of their own influence, but sites come in and out of fashion all the time – email does not. They’re also giving it to all GMail users straight away, and allowing you to link it with your Twitter profile, making the potential audience pretty huge.

I’m looking forward to seeing how Google Buzz develops, and whether or not anyone actually uses it after the initial… err, Buzz… has died down. Of course, my first question is, when’s the first WordPress “Buzz New Posts” plugin coming?

It seems we may be wrong. According to a report by Business Week, Twitter will be reporting a small profit for 2009. It has done this by cutting costs, such as carrier charges for it’s SMS services, and by generating new revenue via it’s deals with Google ($15M) and Microsoft ($10M) for their search integration.

I have to say, I’m impressed. I didn’t catch on at the time that they’d make a lot of money from that, but if the deals have given them the ability to fund their entire yearly operating costs, good work to them!

You can download the extension here, automatic updates are enabled, so you should get new versions as and when I put them up. Please be aware that this extension is quite rough around the edges, (and quite spectacularly ugly,) so please let me know if you manage to break it!

If you choose to use the extension, please let me know, either by commenting below… or by tweeting this page!