Google Buzz from a medical blogger's perspective

The blog post below was brought up by the following discussion:

Ves Dimov, M.D. - Observation: The more seasoned doctors are just joining Twitter at a time when "everybody" is leaving for Google Buzz... :)

Anne Marie Cunningham - I disagree! Twitter is still much more useful for me.

Ves Dimov, M.D. - Twitter is useful because of the great community you can find or establish there. The technical side - not so much.

Jeffrey Benabio, MD - What's your early take on Buzz, Ves?

And here it is:

Google Buzz works surprisingly well for me at this point. Considering that everybody was saying that Google "does not get social media", I did not expect that.

With Buzz, I can finally publish longer micro-blog updates on science and health news that are "blog-able", i.e. they can be used for blog posts later.

Buzz is integrated with Google Reader and has a somewhat more "human feel" than Twitter.

You can edit your posts and attach images. It's a richer media application - for example, BBC podcasts can be played directly from the Buzz update.

The quality of comments is much better on Buzz than on blogs or Twitter one-sentence replies - it is probably because people use their real names tied to a Gmail account.

The Buzz updates are fully searchable - Twitter only searches the last 7 days.

Google Buzz copied some features of Friendfeed, Facebook and Twitter. Google is committed to improving it - it's a very important product for them - make or break, in fact, considering the competition from Facebook. Buzz will be an interesting service to work with.

The adoption rate surpassed all expectations but it is still too early to say - a community is what makes a social network successful. Will see what the future brings.



Comments:

Jeffrey Benabio, MD - Insightful comments. I am stumbling through, but fell Buzz allows for higher quality interaction at "cost" of lower volume.

Arin Basu - Good point, Jeffrey. Also, if you may have noted, you cannot get "buzz" as RSS feeds, cannot mark favourite "buzz"es, cannot hashtag them, etc. Seems to me buzz and tweets belong to two different styles & perhaps each can complement the other. For example, write a longer buzz (or identify a nice buzz, note its url, shorten it, post to twitter, and hastag it for later retrieval). Something like that.

Nicholas Genes - I'm with Ves. Twitter and it's 140-char limit were designed with phones circa 2006 in mind. Buzz was designed with modern smartphones in mind. In a few weeks or months when third-party apps and integration catches up, Twitter will seem hopelessly primitive.

Karin Lewicki - Problem is, I'd been using Twitter for news and it seems perfect for that; 140 is a good limit for a headline and a link. The personal talk, meanwhile, if the most constricted was also the least interesting.

If Buzz takes us back from this new news space into more familiar gossip/chat space, I will be chalking it up as a loss.