When Google Buzz first came out, everyone was talking about it. Was it going to be a Twitter killer? Was it going to be the biggest weapon in Google’s arsenal to take on Facebook? Privacy concerns…what?!?

A while back I wrote an article giving my first impressions of Google Buzz. In it I said I’d follow up after using it for a while to give my thoughts on it after the nostalgia wore off. So what do I have to say about it now? Like many of Google’s newest features, my thoughts are… “Eh”.

Buzz…from a fly, not a bee

Buzz never quite lived up to the hype everyone gave it at launch. No big surprise there. It seems like the privacy concerns got more attention than the product itself, and that hype spawned from all the Facebook privacy “buzz” that never seems to go away.

I’m not interested in looking up actual statistics, because I don’t really think it’s worth the research. From what I’ve observed, most of the posts on Buzz is aggregated Twitter updates, Google Reader updates, linked Picasa accounts, etc. There is very little original content generated on Buzz

It’s not bad…

I really don’t like using Facebook. As a result, I rarely log on, and when I do it’s usually just to post a link (to a new blog post). I have my reasons. I’m on Twitter all the time. I feel I don’t have to be as careful with what I say on Twitter. The problem is that I have a lot of friends that haven’t hopped on the Twitter bandwagon. That’s where Buzz comes in. Most of my personal friends have gmail accounts, and why not? When it came out its competition was Hotmail, and calling it competition is a stretch. Over the years my address book has grown, and Buzz was able to use that to instantly give me people that I already knew to follow. After linking my Twitter feed (I didn’t want my Twitter feed on Facebook, since I hate using Facebook) I had plenty of content for my Buzz followers. There have been a few conversations on Buzz from Twitter updates that wouldn’t have happened on Twitter alone.

It’s not that great either

I added a shortcut to my Buzz account on my iPhone. A while back it stopped updating. I’d log out and back in, but it still wouldn’t update. I kept the shortcut around, mostly to remind me that I eventually needed to write a follow-up article on what I thought about Buzz. Now I can finally delete it for good. To be honest, if it wasn’t for the fact that there’s a nifty icon next to the Buzz link when I log in to Gmail, I probably wouldn’t pay it any attention at all. It does add some value, but in the end, all I can really say about it is… “Eh”.