Shooting at Bubbles

Note: This open letter is strictly from a writer’s (content producer) point of view and is not intended as an attack in any fashion.

Dear DeWitt and the Google Buzz Team,

Just to clarify something based on the note above – I think there is a lot of potential for Buzz or I wouldn’t be wasting my time writing this (or the other posts I have written about Buzz) and even though I personally think you – meaning the whole team (and by extension Google as a company) – screwed up badly on the launch of Buzz that shouldn’t diminish the potential for the product.

There are times though where as a writer, or content producer, who uses Buzz as an auxiliary notification system I really get pissy with you. Unlike the Friendfeed or Twitter; or even Facebook, practice of either just posting the headline or the headline and an excerpt Buzz takes all our content and posts it .

Now how can I say this nicely: NOT!

Seriously DeWitt, Google doesn’t even do that to newspapers in Google News why would you do that to content producers in Buzz. And it’s not just the text either. This also extended to images included in posts. On one of my other blogs - Braincell Soup – I post a lot of art and illustration type posts which Buzz blindly pulls out all of the images and posts them.

Where is the initiative for readers to click through and actually read our blogs or God forbid sign up for our RSS feeds? Simple – there is none.

Look I realize that the majority of the people using Buzz couldn’t give a shit about our [content producers] feelings when it comes to this but Google should. Every day that goes by it is getting harder and harder for us to get people to visit our blogs or read our RSS feeds.

Sorry but we aren’t doing all this work to provide content for Buzz to get eyeballs with (and any future advertising). We do this hoping that people will find what we have to say, or show, compelling enough to click through to read, or subscribe to. By sucking in everything the way it does Buzz removes any initiative both from our potential readers and also us the writers/producers.

I do have a suggestion but I’ll get to that in a minute.

The other real big problem with how Buzz displays our content is that when it is one of our blog posts there is know way for the reader on Buzz to easily tell that there is a title or that there is even a link to the original post (of course your expand post to read is easy to spot)

Hell you treat Google Shared Items from Greader better than our original content

In a post on Buzz you said this in reply to Dare

To be honest, I couldn’t care less whether people use Buzz itself to post updates. I’d be just as content—probably moreso—if people used blogs again, but with all of the advantages of real-time push and a social graph. For me Buzz is partly just an early adopter of the decentralized protocols that will power other sites (including my own) someday. If Buzz gets people thinking along those lines again then I’d say it is a success.

If this is indeed the case Buzz is going about it the wrong way but I do have a suggestion – content grandularity.

By this I mean give content producers a series of options on how Buzz can treat their content when pulling it in for example

• just the headline
• the headline and either a set character length excerpt or a variable one set by the content producer
• headline and full content
• in the case of multiple images either none, one or all

With that part off of my chest there is one other thing that is really important from a content producer point of view and that is – just what the hell is Google’s social media roadmap?

A while back Google launched with much hot air and hype the whole Google Friend Connect initiative and there is sat like a lump of coal. Now we have Buzz coming on the scene also with a bunch of hype about how this is going to be the social network of the future (okay maybe I’m being a little liberal there).

Which is which here guys? Seriously, where are we suppose to be putting our efforts to help Google achieve its objectives?

Look I may not be the biggest fan of Google but I want its social initiative to succeed because I don’t want this to be just a Facebook world (shoot me now if that is going to be the end result). The problem is Google is acting like a schizophrenic school kid – we don’t have the faintest clue where you are going or what you want so there is nothing we can to to help or evangelize.

For example on both this blog and on WinExtra I have the Friend Connect widget but I am now asking myself why and I don’t have answer. I don’t because Google doesn’t seem to know itself which leaves the very people who could be doing everything possible to make Google’s social media efforts a success out in the cold.

So where does all this come together DeWitt? Are we really wasting our time or is all this going to come together at some point and make some sense?

Content producers might not work at Google but in some ways we are, or should be considered to be partners since it is our content that helps make Google – and now Buzz – what it is.

So how about treating us as such for a change and without a lot of empty platitudes.

Sincerely,

Steven Hodson – just another content producer wishing Google and Google Buzz all the success it deserves.