Say what you will about Google Buzz (and plenty of people have), one thing is clear: it’s doing what any new technology aims to do.  Be disruptive.  The main question that people have been grappling with since its launch is whether or not this particular brand of disruption has necessarily been good.

From my vantage point, there are two areas that have seen the biggest disruption from Buzz.  The first is our own personal identity.  And I’m not talking about the privacy issues.  Yes, these are big privacy concerns, and Google doesn’t deserve a pass, but they’ve already started to take steps to rectify the privacy situation.  The deeper sociological implication that the privacy issue strikes at, though, is how we treat different segments of our online personality.  Until now, email was always the most private.  It existed in a separate realm than social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter.  The email address was the most direct, most serious, and most intimate way of interacting with someone online.  Google’s integration of your contacts into chat and reader applications made sense because these communities were very private.

Buzz immediately broke down these walls; not just with privacy snafus, but by attempting to aggregate your online identity in a place that was linked to your email.  Literally.  Content from sites like Google Reader, Picasa, Flickr, Twitter, and Gchat can now appear in one aggregated stream.  Which forces people to look at their email not just as an address, but as a full-on social network profile.  In fact, when people rushed to change their privacy settings, it was the first time a lot of people really understood that such a thing as “Google Account settings” existed.  It’s a somewhat understated and nonmaterial difference, but it is a tidal shift in our personal conceptions of our email and contacts.

This dovetails with the issues created from the second major area of disruption, the disruption of share communities.  This happens on two levels.  The first is that of the major social networks, which were already suffering from concerns as far as differentiation.  Buzz now offers yet another avenue for real-time information updates, which should create a period of confusion for communities as they try to figure out where in the online social landscape this newcomer fits.

Which causes issues for the second level of share communities, which are our personal networks that we have built up over time.  A flood of new, undifferentiated information threatens share community ecosystems by creating burnout or backlash not just against technology but individuals, as well.

In the end, though, these theoretical concerns might be overwhelmed by the potential for Buzz’s content generation.  And this isn’t just conjecture: by the end of week one, Google pulled in over nine million posts and comments. At best, Buzz will find acceptance and a niche in terms of sharing and aggregation that will become a vital part of people’s Internet tendencies.  At worst, it’ll be seen as a misstep, but will probably continue humming along despite the disappointment.

Or at the bizarre, maybe Brazil will find a use for it.

Tags: community, Google, privacy, social media

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 10:27 am and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.