Google Buzz, bright idea but why?

Maybe I'm just not getting it. Maybe I never will. I read the information, watched the video, and have been "buzzing" with my friend TiVO25 for nearly 20 min now. What does Buzz accomplish?

Let me share with you a few things it does do well first. The application does share and start conversations well. I can follow the conversation with absolute ease and the user interface is easy and clean. Everything is within Gmail so I'm not really having to learn anything new. Very intuitive and fast. The response time is quick and I'm not left wondering it buzz is working. There are features which I would expect to see like email this and reply commenting as well. Yep, that's about it.

Now here are the things I do not like. As Buzz is rolled out to people, they are automatically added to my followers. I never manually added anyone to my followers or to be followed, it was automatic. By default all conversations are public and are stored on the web along with a profile page. Here is mine as an example (http://ping.fm/veXvi). I never asked for the profile page, and all my conversations in buzz to be auto added to a page, which can now be crawled and added to the search cache. Oops when I added the other sites to Buzz it auto posted my last tweet and blog entry, thanks for asking first! I auto spammed my gmail friends with materials. There is a link in my mailbox side nav for buzz, so why am I also getting it in my mail inbox? My blackberry is having seizures trying to keep up with Gmail mobile because I'm having a buzz conversation? No thanks.

My biggest concern is that this only takes information from other sites, it doesn't send it out. It would have been better if this was like ping.fm (where I am writing this now as we speak). I want ease of use. It is easy for me to login to mail and send an update to all my syndicated sites (facebook, twitter, blogger, etc). What does it accomplish to have my buzz updated from these sites, where my friends, family, and followers already exist? Who is reading my buzz then? Is it to try and convert more people to Gmail? Why would I do that? Email is a personal choice. Do I believe Gmail is better? Yes! Am I going to say that buzz is a reason to migrate over to gmail as a mail platform? No.

All in all buzz looks great, works fast, and does what exactly? My already used, flexible, and well established services are not enhanced by this product, neither am I for that matter.

Program of Study

Well after some reworking and decisions on my part I have decided on my program of study direction at DSU. I will be specializing in Information Assurance and Computer Security (yay!). Now to work through all the fun stuff.

Of course I will need to complete the smaller coursework which everyone has to take along the way, but at least I can start preparing my literature review now though. I am learning EndNote however I really wish there were a solution in the cloud for this. EndNote does a fantastic job and I love the fact that I can download trees of citations from the library and post them directly into the application, I just feel that there is a better way to accomplish this goal.

There is going to be a proposal defense sometime this week and I love sitting in on these. The proposal will be on "Virtual Teams: Towards Improving Work Effectiveness through Collaboration Process Structure Training”. This sounds so interesting. I wish Dawn all the best on the defense.