…spamming buzzards.
Twitter has always seemed like (and grown more and more to seem like) the ultimate dumbing down of already PDD (pretty darned dumb) social networking services, but it’s been surpassed in asininity by Google Buzz in Buzz’s first outing! Dennis Howlett’s take in a recent ZDNet post pretty much firmed up my own reservations:
Despite the claim to help me: ‘to start conversations about the things you find interesting,’ it does nothing of the sort. Instead, it adds in any ’stuff’ that people it has decided I am following put into their Buzz (a bit like Twitter) along with any other accounts that Google has linked via their profiles such as Flickr, Twitter, Google Reader, assorted blogs….the list goes on. In other words it is aggregating a pile of stuff and lobbing it over the wall into my GMail.
A MUCH worse tale of woe is here. A good cautionary tale affirming my decision to board the Buzz train only after (and only IF) it proved itself.
Now, I’d already been annoyed enough at GMail’s activation of a chat “feature” that resulted in spam chat being flung my way (until I found the link at the very bottom of a GMail page that let me turn chat OFF), so I wasn’t looking forward to being spammed by Buzz in a similar–or worse!–manner. First time GMail had a notice about Buzz, I hit the bottom of the page looking for an OFF switch. *phew!* There it was.
All better now.
*heh*