Google has been getting a great deal of well deserved criticism over their haphazard and privacy destroying new feature Buzz. The primary thrust of these criticisms is that Buzz, without the user’s permission and with a very convoluted opt-out process, makes information Gmail users believed was private available to a wide variety of people. Google has blundered into a rather embarrassing mess for themselves and they would be wise to clean it up post haste.
But the most interesting aspect of this isn’t about privacy or opt-outs. It’s about why Google thought this was a good idea in the first place. It seems fairly obvious that Google watched in horror as the Facebook Death Star got closer and closer to fully armed and operational and decided to strike back before it was too late. After all, there’s no iron law of the internet that says that search companies must be the dominant players. Ten years ago plenty of very smart, very connected people believed all that crap about “portal” sites like Yahoo!, MSN and AOL being the internet’s gatekeepers. Google ate their lunch and finished digesting it before the other sites realized what was happening.
But like any good predator Google knows that its place atop the food chain is never secure. They are always on the lookout for new things and new threats, and all the stuff that falls under the rubric of “social networking” most definitely qualifies as a threat. It’s an on-line behavior that doesn’t require massive indexing of disparate websites (which is what Google is good at). Like any internet company Google doesn’t like it when people can use the internet without using them and Buzz was Google’s latest attempt to be a comprehensive internet company, one that has its fingers in every worthwhile pie.
The failure of Buzz, and make no mistake it is a failure already, was foreordained when Google attempted to leverage its dominant position in webmail into a jump start on social networking. From Google’s perspective Buzz undoubtedly seemed like a very natural evolution of Gmail. Google knows what percentage of Gmail messages go to other Gmail accounts, and based on the ubiquity of @gmail.com it’s probably a big number. To an engineer it’s simple: if both sides of the conversation are running your software that means it’s easy to add more capabilities, so why not add them?
What they failed to take into account is that the level of on-line presence (and disclosure) with which people are comfortable varies enormously. On an internet where Facebook expands like a brushfire and Twitter goes from unknown service to commonly understood verb in less than two years it’s easy to assume that everyone is rushing to place their whole lives on-line. But it ain’t necessarily so. Just as at a party there are prima donnas and there are wallflowers, some people will want to share their whole lives on-line and others won’t.
Even that is a gross simplification however, because the variety of ways for people to interact is always increasing. Someone who abhors the idea of having a Facebook account may live and die on Flickr. Someone who loves uploading YouTube videos may have no use whatsoever for Twitter and vice versa. There is no generic internet user anymore than there is a generic person. And this diversity, not only of the people on-line but of the different things they do on-line, is only going to increase as technology improves and broadband access spreads.
Buzz was an attempt to homogenize the way people operate on-line and that is why it’s been such a spectacular failure. When people think of “e-mail” certain characteristics spring to mind, including the fact that any given message is directed at a finite and chosen number of recipients and that the communication is private between those people. (Though any recipient can, of course, disseminate the message further.) When people think of “social networking” a different set of characteristics spring to mind. Blending the two in an effort to take another step towards some shimmering ideal of the Ultimate Communication Tool is a fool’s errand.
The greatest attraction of the internet is agreement. You can find people who like the same things you do and you get to do things the way you want to do them. Trying to force people to do things a certain way will never work. The privacy problems of Google Buzz are just the symptom, the cause is that Google failed to understand that everyone gets to use the internet the way they want to and a lot of people don’t want anything to do with social networking.
