Buzzkill
As you may have read, today we announced our plans to retire Google Buzz along with some other products. Many people anticipated that we would retire Buzz, so this shouldn't come as a huge surprise. But as someone closely involved in the creation of Buzz, I wanted to share some personal thoughts.
Context & Ripple Effects
Buzz launched in February 2010 bolted onto Gmail, and within days hit a publicly flagged privacy flaw over auto-generated follower lists, forcing Google into an emergency "code red" response and follow-up settings confirmations. By late March 2010, internal-style comparisons had Buzz trailing so badly in user sharing activity that commentary likened its performance to losing to a dead man.
Today's retirement note comes not from a product manager defending the experiment but from someone on the Google+ side reflecting personally on Buzz's creation — a telling signal that Google's social ambitions have consolidated around Google+, leaving Buzz as the cautionary first draft.
First-order effects
- Buzz users lose the sharing layer embedded in Gmail, and Google redirects whatever residual social engagement existed there toward Google+.
- The team that fought to save Buzz through the February 2010 crisis formally concedes the product, closing out an eighteen-month attempt to retrofit social sharing onto email.
Second-order effects
- Google's social portfolio narrows to a single flagship, raising the stakes for Google+ to absorb displaced users rather than letting them drift to Facebook or Twitter.
- Each high-profile shutdown reinforces a perception among users and developers that Google launches social products fast and kills them fast, which raises the trust bar for future experiments.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Google's platform strategy shifts from scattering standalone social features across properties to concentrating identity and sharing in one logged-in product — with the 2010 privacy backlash serving as the template for how not to opt users in.
- The episode adds to the industry's growing graveyard of big-company social clones, strengthening the argument that distribution alone does not create a sharing network once habits have formed elsewhere.
The trend: Large platforms are pruning failed social experiments and consolidating around a single flagship network, accepting that distribution advantages do not overcome entrenched sharing habits.