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Google Buzz has been getting a lot of attention over the last 48 hours, “its a twitter killer”, “its a disqus killer” “its a facebook killer” “its a wave killer” etc etc etc etc

Heres a few reasons why I won’t think it will succeed, at least in killing other services out there.  Please note these things are immediate first impressions, not prolonged use:

1. Its not a Twitter killer – Twitter succeeds because its deals with signal vs. noise in a unique way.  By forcing tweets to be less than 140 characters, only the important information is included.  Buzz doesn’t have this limit, imagine all the people you follow on Twitter into Buzz.  The amount of content produced and shown (especially since the current UI shows comments by default) will be astronomical.  Buzz has yet to show how it is going to deal with signal v noise.
2. Its not a Facebook killer – Buzz is all about publishing with sharing tacked on, Facebook is about sharing with publishing tacked on.  The walled garden of Facebook for better or for worse puts users into a sense of security.  Buzz is public by default, Facebook is private by default (despite Facebooks stupid privacy changes), this alone changes how people use it.
3. Google sucks at social and content generation – Don’t get me wrong, I love Google and their idiosyncrasies.  But it has to be said, Google sucks at social, and anything Google has done with regards to content generation sucks (rather than aggregation of other media which it is great at).
4. It’s not a Wave killer – People are under the misconception that Wave is the awful interface that was meant to replace email.  It’s not.  Wave is an underlying server structure that deals with a lot of current issues with synchronous communication and data breakdowns.  Buzz may actually be built on top of Wave, but again probably not, as Buzz (at least at this stage) doesn’t have functionality that needs OT and federation support.
5. No API – The “API” for Buzz at the moment is nothing more than a nested RSS feed (each profile has an RSS feed, and each story has an RSS feed of comments).  Nothing new here.  Twitter succeeded by having a rich API that people could applications that made sense out of the stream of data.  Any application could have Twitter as an output, whether for notifications, awareness, or another medium to publish on.  Any service like this: you need multiple ways to get data in and get data out.
6. Its stuck in Gmail – I love gmail, I use it everyday…from the comfort of Mail.app.  As far as I’m concerned there are 2 people that use the web interface for Gmail (apart from everyone using it from a public machine such as in a netcafe) – people who are web browsers fanatics, and people who don’t know how to hook their Gmail up to something like Outlook or Mail.  Web fanatics are those who already have a Blog, already using Twitter every 30 seconds, already running Disqus and already using Tumblr.  These people aren’t going to abandon an existing infrastructure that already have critical mass for something that only a limited amount of people will see.  For those using Gmail because they don’t know any better, chances are they aren’t going to post much because they aren’t going to grok it.

If anything, Buzz is much more likely to kill news sites such as Engadget, Blogger, and anything where there is rich content generation.  Buzz is essentially just a decentralised Blog recentralised inside Gmail.

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The screen sharing infinite loop

An interesting issue that I encountered when working on 2 macs at the same time. Stupidly I didn’t close 1 set of screen sharing before I opened the other. Unfortunately I couldn’t take a screenshot, as the computer was having a hard time keeping up with the infinite redraws.

The coolest thing was that a growl notification popped up as it was happening, so the notification went down the tunnel in a really really nice animation. I wish I had a phone which would take movies! *curses iPhone*

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Just a quick one, I was having a problem where Mail on Leopard was running very very slow. For instance, when typing an email, the text would show up 5 seconds after I had typed it. Anyways, to fix this issue:

http://www.hawkwings.net/2007/03/01/a-faster-way-to-speed-up-mailapp/

My mail sql db only went down a few meg, but the speed is phenomenal, running as fast as when it was first installed.

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