Buzz, Wave, Poke

Why again did gmail lose its beta tag? Isn't this just about the biggest beta feature they could have tried to shove in there?

JAMSHED AVARI, Deputy Editor

Buzz, Wave, Poke

So the future is now a Buzz, not a Wave. Google’s brave first attempt at redefining email, instant messaging and group social interaction has been a bit of a bust and while it seemed that the company itself had run out of ideas for it, maybe they were just too busy with Buzz to actually spend time improving it. With scarcely any new features or improvements since its initial launch, Wave has pretty much floundered despite the massive amount of hype around it and the genuine goodwill and enthusiasm with which it was greeted.

Wave was discussed in public ages before it was first available to most web users, as a result of which wave invites had nearly as many people scrambling for them as Gmail invites did nearly six years ago. In stark contrast, nearly nothing about Buzz was known till a day or so before its launch, and every single Gmail user was able to participate within 48 hours. Does this show that Google learnt a lot about how to launch and promote its new products?

NO DOUBT WE’LL SEE BETTER VIBES FLOWING  BETWEEN GMAIL’S GRAFTED LIMBS IN THE FUTURE

Oh yes it does. As several companies have proved, people will use things that are put right in front of them even if they don't know what to do with them at first. Where Wave was somewhat experimental, this is the big jump off. Google’s been desperate to get into social media for years, and despite everything it’s achieved, it just hasn’t managed to crack this nut. Orkut is barely known in most of the world, Picasa is limited to photos, Latitude is too specialized, Reader and Groups have their own conventions, and none of them feed critical status and location information into Google’s omnipresent user database, at least not on the scale at which Facebook and Twitter operate. This information is critical to Google’s next phase of growth: supertargeted content and advertising. The decision to fuse Buzz into Gmail could not have been taken lightly. It’s definitely not the most obvious or the most convenient marriage of two online services; the buzz “tab” is equated to one of your mail folders, though it is clearly no such thing. And your Chat list with its own status update box is right there, giving you two separate and different ways to tell the world what you’re thinking, even if one is somewhat awkwardly linked to the other.

No doubt we’ll see better vibes flowing between Gmail’s various grafted limbs at some point in the future: my guess is a single, permanently visible status update box across all Google properties. Mobile apps will be a huge push too, since they can pass on GPS location data which your computers can’t. So would Wave have succeeded if it had been part of Gmail and received improvements as quickly as Buzz? Quite likely. People would at least have stayed interested enough to check in on it once in a while. As it stands now, Wave is just too awkward. Unfortunately for it, it’s also just too yesterday.

We might also see a more evolved Buzz as a standalone product, eventually relegating Orkut to the scrap heap (which wouldn’t be so bad considering it's losing massive ground to Facebook and everyone’s profile information and contact lists can already migrate with zero loss).