Google Needs to Put the Buzzkill on a Dead Product

Jeff Bullas had a post up on his blog, Is Twitter About to Terminate Google Buzz, that discussed how Google Buzz is essentially dead.

However, I don’t think Twitter killed Google Buzz. I think Google Buzz killed Google Buzz. I had high hopes for it. I really did. I didn’t see it as a Twitter killer or substitution for Twitter, but rather a more social version of the Google Reader Share with Note feature. I thought it might be a nice way to write a few lines about a blog post or news item you stumbled across. And with more blogs disabling comments, I thought it had potential to usher in a new era of blog commenting.

It didn’t. And I blame Google Buzz for crushing my Google Buzz dreams. First, there was the privacy issue, which, even though they sort of fixed it, shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Second, there was no good way to filter Google Buzz. It was in your inbox and it was on or off. There was no real in-between setting to choose from.

Perhaps if Google opened up the API earlier, we could have seen some nifty clients like we did with Twitter. Or maybe apps like HootSuite and TweetDeck would have added in Google Buzz and we could have had some better filtration and monitoring methods. But Google didn’t.

This comes after Google’s last disaster, Google Wave, which is being shut down.

So, I give up on Google creating a decide social networking product, BUT, I don’t give up on Google. I just wish they would channel their energy elsewhere.

Please Google, take Buzz off life support. It’s really just getting sad at this point. Channel that energy into doing something we need you to do-like make it so when we try to download a Google Doc as a Microsoft Word document the formatting doesn’t get all screwed up. If Zoho can do it, so can you! Or work on improving Gmail Offline so I don’t have to worry about Gmail not being able to play nicely with the current desktop email clients on the market.

You tried something different and everyone’s proud of you for that. Social just isn’t your thing. It’s ok. We’ll forgive you. So long as you go back to doing what you do best and being awesome at nearly everything else.