Less than 10 weeks after launching, Google Buzz seems so far to have fallen short of capturing the hearts and minds of the social web. A new report from social media analytics service PostRank has found that 90% of the content published into Buzz is automated: 63% is piped in from Twitter and 27% is from automated RSS feeds.
So does that mean that nobody participates in Buzz? It’s hard to imagine more premium placement for a service than inside every Gmail inbox, so why hasn’t Buzz caught on? To be fair, it’s hard for any service to compete with the volume of imported Tweets and easily added RSS feeds. The fact that 10% of content published is added manually might even be seen as an early success… maybe.
Of course the best part of Buzz is the conversations in comments. In my stream at least, I see some amount of conversation but it’s dominated by a few uber-geeks: people who loved FriendFeed before it was acquired by Facebook.
The whole Buzz model looks a lot like Facebook does these days, in fact. It doesn’t do much else for users, and there are fewer people being social there. Why use Buzz when your friends are on Facebook? Perhaps that’s the question and why Buzz hasn’t caught on.
We’re excited in principle about Buzz because of its potentially disruptive support for open data standards. Apparently it’s mostly robots who get excited about such things, though, as they are mostly the ones coming to the party so far.
There are some hardcore Buzz users discussing this…over on Buzz, too. If you do use Buzz, you can be our friend here. We never post automated content there.
