Making Work Flow

I wanted to briefly weigh in on my experience with Google Buzz.  I find the lifestreaming possibilities of Buzz interesting, but right now I find the new service and its launch problematic.  Just like Facebook did with their prompt to take your stream public, Google took value from a private sphere and then made a massive push to convert it to value in a public sphere.  Predictably, people had the same problems of unintended disclosure of the identities of people they exchange messages with.  The launch of Buzz seems like another chapter in the story of companies focusing on the value they can extract from you instead of the loyalty they achieve by serving you really well.

One of the reasons people love Gmail is the ability to customize a simple and clean e-mail workflow.  It's archiving system helps the determined user to achieve a clean inbox with less effort.  However, here comes Buzz with its unread items count, glaring at you as a reminder that you should be doing something about it.  Whether consciously or unconsciously, Buzz is adding stress to a product whose strength is simplicity.  On top of that, I'm already getting spammed via Buzz, whereas Gmail has been an exemplary spam-killer up until now.  Not good.

As a side note, it's fascinating to me that Steve Rubel, one of the biggest advocates of lifestreaming, is not impressed, while I haven't seen any negative words yet from Jeff Jarvis who I would expect to criticize it for diverging from the principle of elegantly simple organization which he chronicled as instrumental in Google's rise.  Google Buzz is just not very Googley.

Update: For the time being I've decided to leave Buzz enabled and see how it goes.  The timing of this is interesting because I had already been considering moving my personal e-mail and reference workflow to Outlook & OneNote 2010 with Windows Live (look for a big release soon).  It looks like Gmail will become just another social network/aggregator to me.