the onda

For a while I loved Twitter. Not because it was realtime. Not because it was easier than blogging. And not because it was cool.

Mostly because it was a quick way to get a feel for the things that were going on in the lives of folks one level beyond those who I interacted with every day. In having invented a new format (140 characters) and brought into mainstream the asymmetric follow relationship, Twitter brought into the world something really interesting.

But then the marketing people got on it. Or if they were already on it, they got super aggressive about polluting the Twitterverse. Link velocity increased by orders of magnitude, and what started out the types of interesting articles that you might share on Delicious, quickly became links to people's companies, blogs, or special "deals" (thin affiliate scams).

Sure, you could always curate the list of your followers and keep only that 0.01% of folks who had not started using Twitter as a new form of direct marketing. But as Twitter climbed to a billion updates per month something happened to the way in which everyone uses the medium such that even folks who were funny or insightful one third of the time spent the other two thirds plugging their blogs or the new startup they'd just gotten involved with.

And this, it seems to me, is how a new medium gets "typed" by its early adopters. So that now, no matter how many people get on Twitter (and I suspect it won't be many more), it will forever remain the place where the marketing people should have STFU.

Which is why I am excited about Google Buzz. Though in many ways it seems like a copy of the most social/sharing parts of Twitter/Facebook/Friendfeed, I think its got a few key differences that may help it move adoption-wise beyond what these services pioneered. Chief among these attributes are the easy integration with existing communication patterns (Gmail), and the ability to create fine-grained groups and direct the stream of updates at say, just "family" or "college roommates" or whatever.

This last one is important and will be critical to Buzz's eventual success. During the first phase of the Internet, a lot of products struggled and crashed on the reef of privacy controls, and it wasn't until the 2004-2005 era of "default to public" that a lot of the same services started catching on in a meaningful way. The "default to public" era culminated with Facebook's claim that people needed to abandon the notion of privacy online and just get used to being public. For most of the non-tweeting, non-Silicon Valley crowd, this statement is about as alien as claiming that people needed to abandon breathing and get used to hypoxia.

If this right, and the Buzz team gets all of the small affordances right (no small feat despite an impressive 1.0 effort), this blend of email and status updates (in a controlled way) may create a new format— one which which I hope will not again be typed a new kind of weird direct marketing vehicle.

Here's hoping...