Looking for that Chrome or Firefox Extension for Google Buzz?  Maybe see if there is an Adobe Air app?  Mobile apps or anything else Google Buzz related?  Well BuzzAware is the site for you.

BuzzAware currently has about 21 apps that allow you to extend the functionality of Google Buzz

Why is this such a big deal?  What I want to know is:  Why hasn’t Facebook had more visitors than Yahoo! already?  And the numbers are really close too!

This is Compete’s graph:

Now how many of you actually go on Yahoo!  daily?  Please tell me, because I’m anxious to know what people do so much going on there.  And it’s not because it’s your default on Internet Explorer, because that should be the MSN homepage… and if you are still using IE as your default browser… well… then you shouldn’t be on this site.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there’s lots of useful information and news on  Yahoo.com daily.  I mean, if I go on right now, what I see is this fascinating headline:

Really?  The article’s about 100 words long and made me yawn so I left the site.

Oh yeah, here’s the kicker:  Compete.com’s study goes on to say that what really baffled them was the time spent online on Facebook!  Google and Yahoo! are neck & neck at about 4% of total online traffic whereas Facebook is at 11%.

Wouldn’t you much rather want to know what your friend had for dinner?

Or find out where to get free music?

Or even look for friend’s of friends’ wedding albums? (ladies, I know you love this one, but I’m going to let you look up your own!)

And then there’s the fact that one must stay on Facebook to refresh constantly since the newsfeed only works every couple of minutes.  Not that I do that or anything…

But in all seriousness now, what I’m trying to say is, Compete.com and the rest of the world.  Stop making such a big deal about this.  Facebook, as useless as it is useful, is huge because of just that.  It’s hit a point where it’s attracted people of all ages and overall demographics; is serving as a business tool through its applications, fan pages, and paid advertisements; and with online social networking growing more and more everyday, is the hot spot for anyone who wants in!

I know I’m not saying anything new here, everyone knows Facebook is a social media giant, but these facts from Compete also show us how it’s an overall internet giant to be watched.  Everything you get on Google and Yahoo! is on Facebook.  You have the ability to add different news sources’ pages to your Facebook and use it as a sort of RSS feed.  You can watch music videos on Facebook that your friends post or post one yourself.  You can access it and navigate easily on your cell phone.  It’s no wonder Google just launched Buzz.  After seeing their own social media site, Orkut was only a hit in Brazil, India & Pakistan, they realized they needed something kind of (almost exactly like) Facebook in order to keep up, or else pretty soon… Facebook may even catch up to Google.  Now that would be newsworthy ish.

Google is scrambling to repair the security exploit (see lack of follower message view control) they overlooked by stating that the option to block public views of contacts was always there. 

LifeHacker has a decent walk-through and Google has now posted a “we listened to your feedback” post on the official Google blog  page.  This fix is not a perfect solution according to some.  The following is a comment from the afformentioned Life Hacker article from an obviously disgruntled user. 

Google may still have some work to do.

“Where the heck is the ability to prevent people from following before they are approved, preventing them from adding you and reading your previous posts?!?!?

For example, my boss is in my contacts. I don’t want him following me. The only way to do that is to create a contact group and make sure I share with specific groups, not including his. He can still follow me, but he just won’t see anything. That’s not even easy to explain to a new user, especially if they don’t have their contacts cleaned up already. (The only reason I happen to have mine clean is because I sync with an iPhone)

I should be able to prevent any new followers unless I approve them. No one should be able to “follow” me, and then click my name and read all my previous buzzes, unless I want them to and approve them.

Twitter does this by allowing you to have a private account.

I like the “feed” idea of sharing my picassa/blog/etc activities with my followers, but I want those followers to be controlled by me. Not be the entire world.”- njefferson (LifeHacker)

Honestly, you would think Google realizes users don’t want every Jane/John Doe rummaging through previous Buzz posts?   Apparently independant groups are the only way to control this.  Then you can pick and choose who sees what.  Of course that means multiple messages sometimes.   May be message category tags visible to specific Buzz group followers only, could be implemented. 

In any case, it all seems a little messy right now while they work the kinks out.  Knowing Google’s past efforts and commitment to user satisfaction, eventually Buzz will move beyond its public beta phase.

I always feel like...Google is watching meeeeeee. Whoaa o o o

Thank you for the warning Harriet.  ( The BBC NEWS seemed to agree back in 2007)

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.

There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.

You know who my third most frequent contact is?

My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.

My other most frequent contacts? Other friends of Flint’s.

Oh, also, people who email my ANONYMOUS blog account, which gets forwarded to my personal account. They are frequent contacts as well. Most of them, they are nice people. Some of them are probably nice but a little unbalanced and scary. A minority of them — but the minority that emails me the most, thus becoming FREQUENT — are psychotic men who think I deserve to be raped because I keep a blog about how I do not deserve to be raped, and this apparently causes the Hulk rage.

I can’t block these people, because I never made a Google profile or Buzz profile, due to privacy concerns (apparently and resoundingly founded!). Which doesn’t matter anyway, because every time I do block them, they are following me again in an hour. I’m hoping that they, like me, do not realize and are not intentionally following me, but that’s the optimistic half of the glass. My pessimistic half is of the abyss, and it is staring back at you with a redolent stink-eye.

Oh, yes, I suppose I could opt out of Buzz — which I did when it was introduced, though that apparently has no effect on whether or not I am now using Buzz — but as soon as I did that, all sorts of new people were following me on my Reader! People I couldn’t block, because I am not on Buzz!

Fuck you, Google. My privacy concerns are not trite. They are linked to my actual physical safety, and I will now have to spend the next few days maintaining that safety by continually knocking down followers as they pop up. A few days is how long I expect it will take before you either knock this shit off, or I delete every Google account I have ever had and use Bing out of fucking spite.

Fuck you, Google. You have destroyed over ten years of my goodwill and adoration, just so you could try and out-MySpace MySpace.

As seen at Gizmodo via Fugitivus . Pic courtesy Startup Meme.

I have spent the last few days playing around with Google Buzz, on and off, in between work and Twitter. I have watched the videos, read the reviews and conferred with others who are using that service as well as Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare and any other social media avenue.

Now I am prepared to say that Google Buzz is killing my Twitter buzz and not in a good way.   Like Google Wave, I am content to check it once a day at best,  if I remember. Which is why it is likely to not succeed. As users, we don’t have time to check 15 different outlets to receive information and/or put out the information that we deem to be valuable.

Therefore we pick and choose where we will spend our time and attention. Since Twitter has beaten everyone to that punch, I don’t see a need to jump on the Buzz bandwagon. Why would I when the information is exactly the same as it is on Twitter.

I do think it is important for anyone in the technology industry to have a working knowledge of Buzz and Wave and as many platforms as possible. But we have to pick where our efforts are going to be dedicated and that is a choice based on the return we get from those efforts. So, for today, I will focus on Twitter and pay limited attention to Buzz.

I do, however, reserve the right to shift that focus in the future.

Don’t get me wrong. Email is still used, and if you ask anybody trying to sell you an email marketing campaign, it is the best thing ever and just getting better. If you believe that, I have a newspaper to sell you.

Let’s face it, if email was a movie character, it would look like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead. Just like the spammers who messed it up for the rest of us. Fortunately for many of us, we are smarter. We figured out social media. We know Facebook, and Twitter, and RSS. We don’t need your stinkin’ email.

How did this happen? Consider the last time you trusted your cousin Cindy with your email address. Did you ever? I mean, a person can only sort through so many CC:’d political jokes and inspirational poems before their head explodes. I thought “Cc:” was for when you were sending something to a very small group of concerned parties, while “Bcc:” was for sending out to that horde of folks who may or may not have updated their virus protection.

On top of that, actually because of that, you have every con artist in Nigeria begging to wire the $50,000,000 USD that their dead uncle, the Czar of Cantspellworthistan, has tied up in some kind of mysterious probate. Why the heck did the Czar of Cantspellworthistan have US dollars, anyway?

What’s worse is that all of the sudden you have all of cousin Cindy’s pals emailing back and forth. You have seen this, right? The squillion people emailing their LOLs and goofy replies to the whole group of people. Then as soon as just one of those twits gets a virus KABOOM! Your inbox splits at the seams.

This description took a lot of health points away from email the way a shot in the chest does on Halo 3, but since it was still an easy option for reaching everybody from A to Z, it still had a pulse. The sniper rifle shot to the head that finally put email in a body bag came much later.

This is Cousin Cindy. She was so much sweeter back then!

Spam filtering got a little better, and in 2003 some brilliant people enacted The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. It was kind of a joke to most spammers, and in 2004 less than one percent of spam was in compliance with the law. Of course, when the people managing your email servers figured out that there was no way all of the email about Viagra was legitimate, you could actually catch back up with Cindy and her pals’ email, but you had to filter diligently.

On April first 2004, Google’s Gmail came along with some CPR and breathed life back to into email. April first is April Fools’ Day, which is fitting. Email was still looking pretty old and wrinkled, with one foot on a banana peel and the other hanging over a cliff.

In comes MySpace and Facebook like princes on white steeds. The things you had tried so hard to keep up with from Cindy started getting through. If you didn’t read the message, she could just post it to the wall and you could see it whenever you were good and ready.

OK, the wall thing can kind of stink, but that is another post, for another day. Damn you Farmville!

Something nice about the email from social networks is that people are not actually seeing your email and do not have access to harvest it like a 27 year old mullet head in a Camaro at the high school. Plus, I can choose to ignore cousin Cindy’s annoying friend Patty’s friend request.

Since so few people actually have the attention span of a toothpick these days, in comes Twitter to brighten our communications world. Twitter is great. Just tell me what you have to say, but don’t bug me with the story about grandma’s sick cat getting into the trash again with 4,000 words, OK? Think about it a moment first and find a way to cram it down to 140 characters. This works for about 90 percent of the email I used to get. Seriously, I love Twitter. I love it so much I wrote a book about it. I actually sold 14 copies (mostly to mom and her gracious friends). The point about every Twitter user being an expert about Twitter … yeah, another post, another day.

So we all love Twitter, right? Then we have Google trying to jump on board, first with Google Wave and most recently with Google Buzz. It is fine, but I guess I didn’t drink enough Gmail Kool Aid. I still think their efforts are better spent frustrating the less talented SEOs.

All in all, perhaps the greatest killer of email in the social media killing tool set is the RSS feed. It is still a bit confusing to some people like cousin Cindy, but if you just get to know RSS and become close with your reader, (I use Google Reader) you will love it. Before you know it, the “cousin Cindy’s” of the world may pick up on the fact that you can find some pretty darn cool inspirational poems and cute kitty cat pictures without her help. Delivered to your feed reader, even! No spam. Just the stuff you asked for.

Here, just try it for yourself and subscribe to Mobile Local Social so we never get lost in the email.

By the way, if you just cannot stand not knowing my email address, it is thebigcheese@veryimportantguy.com. Ever since I responded to that cheap Rolex offer Cindy sent me, I cannot seem to use it anyway.

Via Twitter. Buzz it up for the Meta Trifecta

The unofficial response by Yahoo! to Google’s announcement of Google Buzz.  But no – that’s not snarky.

Ironically, Yahoo! launched its buzz to compete with Google in the search field.  While it never got the name recognition of Digg, it is a familiar name in no small part because it is part of many badge farms.  I would not be surprised if there’s a lawyer-fight before year’s end on the Buzz name.  Who knows – maybe Yahoo! will get buzz in all lowercase and Google will get Buzz with a capital B.

Google has just announced Google Buzz, Google’s attempt to get into the social networking scene.  It appears that now that Google is trying to horn in on Twitter’s territory.  There’s auto-following and no character limit and you can post video and photos. Of course, with sites like Twitvid and yfrog and Twitpic, you could already post video and photos.

Adding insult to injury, Google has generously lifted the “@” method from Twitter and has its own little version of “Trending Topics”.  There will also be mobile support and geotagging – features that have been done again and again on Twitter.  The only difference is that now, the geotagging has place names.

You can also see who’s “buzzing” near you (a duplication of functionality from Twinkle).

As you may recall, last year, Google took the covers off of Google Wave to much hype and fanfare.  It promptly fizzled into the night.  For a week, Twitter was all about “Who has Wave invites?”, replaced soon thereafter with “Who needs Wave invites?”

For what it’s worth, I got my Wave invite two days in and, having used it for a few days, saw no real use for it.  When I collaborate in the office, I use the telephone and face-to-face meetings.  And if I want to chat with friends, there are IM clients.  Wave was looking for a niche that had been filled and filled again.

Ultimately, it looks like Google is riding other people’s coattails.  Tweetdeck, which just announced added functionality to its desktop client yesterday, has been offering many of the features that Google Buzz is promising to offer.  Additionally, last week, Facebook released its minor facelift (which I kind of like).

Google has seen some of the luster come off is golden halo.  Wave fell flat.  The Nexus One is underperforming.  Google Voice is just kind of sitting there. I’m a firm believer that one cannot succeed merely by offering an alternative to a market leader.  One must differentiate oneself.  Google Buzz does not presently appear to differentiate itself from Twitter or Facebook.

If I want to update my status, I’ll update my Facebook status.  If I want to tweet a nonsensical thought, I’ll tweet on Twitter.  If I want to search for something, I’ll use Google (and now Bing).  What I won’t do is abandon a perfectly good platform for a new platform from an 800-lb. gorilla just because the gorilla wants more territory.  The only smart move I see from this is having it as an add-on to GMail (instead of a standalone like Wave).

Ultimately though, Google is starting a war on two fronts on a battlefield that it has never been in before.  To make matters worse, Google has decided to fight the two biggest names in social media at the same time.  While I ordinarily don’t second-guess the business judgment of multi-billion dollar global corporations, Google has a tough row to hoe.  It hasn’t performed well outside of search.  It’s too soon to call it but I view buzz with great skepticism.