Google Buzz – The Gmail Inbox Killer

I’m not going to lie, I’m a Google fangirl, so when I heard about Wave I was really excited. I think there are a lot of great things that could come from it – but it never seemed to take off, largely due to the very limited release. It is hard to be excited about an awesome service when you can’t share it with anyone or use it for anything. I just kept hoping Google would open it up more – then I heard about Buzz. In a lot of ways it felt like Google had abandoned Wave for Buzz, so I thought I’d check it out.

In short? I hate it. I don’t use a browser to check my mail, so the fact that I have to log into Gmail to access Buzz is kind of annoying. On top of that I made the mistake of following and responding to a fairly famous freelancer…my inbox got slammed with replies from people I didn’t know and wasn’t following. Now, I’m all for being communicative and in theory this is great – it could really help build a sense of community where as Twitter often feels more isolative – but the fact that I couldn’t shut down or manage the responses to this person (that I really wanted to follow) forced me to unfollow and silence the threads just to be able to clean up my inbox.

I’m hesitant to abandon Buzz entirely, I think there could be a place for it just as there is a place for Twitter and Facebook, but at this point it is really just annoying. As a friend of mine said, “Gmail has flies.”