+Me

After playing around with Google+ for a few days, I've decided I really like the service. In particular, I like the one feature that sets it apart from those other major social networking services. Unfortunately there is one thing that I'm still really grappling with: Google Buzz.

Buzz started out as a Twitter-like service from Google which was built into Gmail as a feature. This made it immediately available to millions of users, creating an instant network of acquaintances for each user. There was one overriding flaw here, though, and I don't mean the much-ballyhooed privacy concerns that transfixed the Web. The biggest problem with Buzz was that it was built into an unrelated service. I understand that unveiling Buzz as a standalone service wouldn't have made it as visible as attaching it to Gmail, one of Google's flagship products, but frankly the two are not at all complimentary. Of course, other Google products were adapted to make use of the Buzz API, but Gmail was inexplicably chosen as the "home" of the sharing service.

Enter Google+. Released as a proper social networking service that stands on its own, Google+ is everything Buzz should have been. Unfortunately, instead of properly folding Buzz into the Google+ experience, they chose to stuff the old service under a tab on the "Profile" view of the new service. As a result some Google services (Gmail, Reader) seem to integrate with Buzz, while others integrate with Google+ (Picasa, Youtube), and there is no way to tell with any certainty what will show up where. To make matters worse, if I want to see my own Buzz in Google+, I have to visit the tab under my own profile. It doesn't show up in my "Stream" view. Others' Buzz isn't visible at all in Google+, you still have to use Gmail. Speaking of the "Stream" view, I've also discovered that photos may or may not show up in the "Posts" view on users' profiles. I found that photos shared with the mobile app appeared in my "Posts", but a photo added directly to a public Picasa album (commented on in Google+) was visible in my "Stream", but not in my "Posts". Youtube videos (so far) appear in both views.