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Goodbye to Google Buzz, which had a lot of potential

Google announced today that they're going to be discontinuing Google Buzz. That probably won't come as a surprise to most people, who'll probably mostly be amazed that Buzz was still around, but for me, it's actually kind of a disappointment. Buzz had become pretty useful for me, mostly as a better interface for commenting on Google Reader's shared items.

The thing is, Buzz could have done a whole lot more. That exact same idea (Reader shares, Twitter and blog incorporation, status messages) could have been implemented in gmail AND been given a separate space. You could have opted out in gmail, but still used the standalone site to interact and share. Their one big misstep was automatically adding friends rather than letting you build those from the ground up. If they had been more patient with it and started with a simple on/off privacy mode rather than trying to force everyone to use it with frustrating privacy settings, I think it could have succeeded.

In short, everything they needed to create a good social media hub around Google was there. They just did it wrong, and they're doing it wrong again with Plus. The difference is that Plus gets praised and Buzz gets hated, but there's not much of a difference between the two. I wonder how many of these products Google will have to make before they get it right.
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