Yes it’s a post about buzz

Speculating about whether Google Buzz will ‘halve Facebook’s value‘ is an interesting diversion but not ultimately satisfying to me. As a developer I want to consider the ways in which Buzz can change the way the web works, and the way that users can use the web. I’m particularly interested in understanding Buzz’s place in the platform ecosystem, how it relates to Twitter and, of most curiousity to me, Wave.

So far Wave has not been the game-changer Google suggested it would be, but I’m not discounting it. As far as I’m concerned it’s Email 2, and Google would only have to roll out Wave as a ‘new version’ of the current Gmail to all of a sudden garner a lot of interest.

But again that’s pure speculation and not what I’m interested in writing about today. A particular aspect of these services has caught my attention, in particular the embedding features.

Mashable have added a ‘Buzz This’ button to their blog, which looks like a little hack on Google Reader:

<a rel="nofollow external" target="_blank"
href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=http://mashable.com/2010/02/10/google-buzz-contest/&amp;title=Google+Buzz+Contest%3A+Win+a+Google+Nexus+One&amp;srcURL=http://mashable.com/">
<img height="58" width="50" alt="" src="http://mashable.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-digg-this/i/google-buzz.png" original="http://mashable.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-digg-this/i/google-buzz.png">
</a>

The link provides a prompt to add a comment and post the item in your Buzz profile. It’s a really simple way to blogs to push their content out through Buzz.

Wave as it’s own embed strategy, which is to actually embed a Wave into a page, as @kevinblake demonstrates in this example post.

At the moment these two features are disparate, but they indicate an overriding theme that Google have hinted at before in rhetoric around Wave – a ubiquitous sharing and conversation platform across the web. Layers over the web that unify individual websites into a single whole. This is, to me anyway, an exciting idea.

I also see Buzz as a way to blog.  There’s currently no direct integration between WordPress and Buzz (nor with Blogger at this stage), and until Buzz offers the kind of features that make WordPress useful to me (stats, mainly) I wouldn’t use it as such. I would however cross-post, which is what I’m going to do today.

Google’s vision is just much bigger than Facebook’s. So perhaps Buzz could hurt Facebook, but I also imagine Google aren’t bothered. Facebook is one of the engines that keeps the web churning. Google on the other hand is more about infrastructure, they’re the banks that the river flows between. What would the river be without something to produce a current?