Buzzing, Tweeting and Carping

Funny, isn’t it? The people who review gadgets generally aren’t the people who buy them.

After all, whom would you hire to write your tech column, Average Joe Consumer or someone with advanced technical skills?

Exactly. So tech reviewers tend to be devotees, the people who get sweaty-palmed at the thought of 64-bit addressing and multiband radios — not members of the target audience, the hundreds of millions who will actually spend money on these things. That’s why tech blogs often savage easy-to-use products that become huge hits (the Flip camera), but adore more technical products that would overwhelm normal people (Linux).

All of this brings us to Buzz, the new would-be Twitter from Google

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At its heart, Twitter is dead simple: you type little messages into the box at Twitter.com — news, jokes, observations. Your messages show up on the screens of your followers, whoever’s signed up to receive them.

That simplicity has made Twitter a huge hit. But “simple” usually means “limited,” and Twitter is no exception. Your messages can’t be longer than 140 characters. There’s no text formatting. You can’t paste in photos or videos. There’s no filtering of messages. No way to rank or rate people or their utterances. No way to send messages out to canned groups of people, like Family or Co-workers.

Google Buzz overcomes all of that. It’s a lot like Twitter (with huge helpings of FriendFeed.com thrown in), but there’s no length limit on your messages. You can search for messages, give certain ones a “thumbs up” (you click a button labeled Like as you do in Facebook). You can forward messages by e-mail. Comments and replies to a certain post remain attached to it, clumped together as a conversation. You can link to your Flickr, Picasa or YouTube accounts, making it easy to drop a photo or a video link into a Buzz posting.

You can also post messages to your Buzz account by e-mail, which is great when you’re on the move.

That feature works only if you send the message from your Gmail account, which brings up a huge Buzz point: it’s deeply intertwined with Gmail, Google’s free e-mail service. In fact, Buzz is an icon nestled right in there between Inbox and Sent Mail. So you need a Gmail account to use Buzz. No problem, unless you feel that Google has its paws on way too much of the world’s personal information already.

And if you are, in fact, a privacy fanatic, Google Buzz may not be the social-networking tool for you. The service’s introduction last week caused a ripple of horror through the paranoia-inclined.

See, on Twitter, when you first start out, you’re not “following” anyone at all, which would make it a very silent, boring place. So when you sign up, Twitter shows a list of current members with a track record of being funny or interesting — a starter set of people to follow.

Google decided to go that one better: it would automatically sign you up to follow the people you communicate with most often on Gmail or Google Chat.

Unfortunately, that meant that anyone —friends, enemies, perfect strangers — could see whom you communicate with most often, just by examining your Buzz profile page.

Google worked furiously over the weekend; in several waves of updates, it fixed the privacy holes and wrote apologetic blog posts. Now when you sign up, Google merely suggests people you might want to follow; you have to approve or reject the suggestions. It’s also much easier to turn off Buzz completely with one click.

So now, Buzz isn’t nearly as much of a privacy concern. But don’t worry — it’s still got plenty of problems to go around.

The biggest one: confusion.

In eliminating the Twitterish bare-bones simplicity, Google stepped right splat into the opposite problem: dizzying complexity. At the moment, it’s not so much Google Buzz as Google “Huh?”s.

Why aren’t the incoming posts in simple chronological order, as they are on Twitter? (Answer: Because every time someone comments on an older post, it pops back up to the top.)

You can connect Buzz to Twitter. But it’s a one-way, passive link: your Twitter posts appear on Buzz — eventually — not vice versa. And there’s no Buzz-Twitter linkage of followers or replies. And connections are available to Facebook.

When you see a good Buzz post, you can e-mail it to someone. But, weirdly, you can’t pass it on to your Buzz followers (what, on Twitter, is called re-Tweeting).