Varna’s Mind

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Gmail Buzz: Mixing Real Life And Your Preferred Discussion Group In All the Wrong Ways?

If I would talk to you about my family life, I think you wouldn’t understand the one half, and you wouldn’t care about the other half. Conversely, if I would talk to my family about the latest tech topics, perhaps they wouldn’t be interested on any detailed level, nor understand half of what I’m saying.

Enter Google Buzz. After one day of using it I get the feeling it mixes the two groups (and a couple of other groups) in potentially all the wrong ways. When you sign up with Buzz you can choose who to follow, and unfollow everyone from Google’s list of suggestion with whom you actually prefer to just email. But here’s the thing... other people may still decide to follow you. You send them emails often, which makes Google suggest you to them. So now Buzz turns out to be a kind of Friendfeed, but it may get the most crucially important thing crucially wrong: picking the relevant discussion group.

Yes, perhaps you do manage to split up your life into several different Google accounts (work, peer group, family, ...?), and maybe you use different browsers or a browser extension to help you with the signing in and signing out. But that looks like it could become confusing (and people subscribing to you may pick the wrong account of yours to subscribe to, unless you always used these multiple accounts in the past). In the meantime, Martin Rix in Buzz writes: “My dad and my 13 year old cousin are following me. I expect my mum and sister will be following me soon.... which will be when I disconnect my Twitter account :P”

It’s still too early for me to tell if above-mentioned is high enough a usage barrier to render Buzz useless (useless in the sense of “If your product Fails, it doesn’t matter if it’s Good”). And I suppose it will take some more days for all of your family members to discover your Buzz stream. So what is your experience with Buzz so far – is Google helping you find the right discussion groups? Will Google pushing Buzz so aggressively to so many people – all of Google’s email users – make it a casual tool for casual users, but not so suited for in-depth discussions of a certain area... and a perfect teen user repellant because “mom is lurking"?

Update: A user by the name of Doyle in a comment at Lifehacker writes:

What annoys me most about this is that I have used my gmail for years, including as a forward for a small business I once owned. ALL of my previous clients were put into my contacts by gmail automatically. (...)

[N]ow, tons of people on a list I want nothing to do with can track me online, connecting my business and personal life in ways I am not even remotely comfortable. (...)

I like the idea of interconnecting, but by connecting, I want compete and total control of the situation. I do not need my mother to know my business, and I do not need my business to know about my mother.

If this was started on a blank slate those divisions could be made clear

Gmail Buzz: Mixing Real L ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (20)

>> More posts

Advertisement

The Vision

Imagine if online data was as fun and accessible as online video. While most content types are handled gracefully on the web, data remains an obtuse mess. On the web you can create beautiful things with text. You can make images dance on a page. You can integrate video effortlessly. And yet data remains cumbersome, static and opaque.

How do you put data on the web today?

• Paste it in ugly lists
• Post it as a bunch of goofy files and catalogs
• Ask a developer to spend weeks creating a useful interface to it

Tableau Public is a new alternative. It lets you publish data visualizations to the web that are useful and beautiful. These visualizations answer questions and tell stories. You can publish one in minutes. Visit the Gallery to see how people are using Tableau Public.

The Technology

There’s a revolutionary technology behind Tableau Public called VizQL: A Visual Query Language. You don’t need to be a programmer to use Tableau Public. VizQL is all under the hood. But it lets us do what we do.

Learn why Turing Award Winner Jim Gray recognized VizQL as a breakthrough.

“If you have ever been frustrated when trying to plot a useful graph from a simple spreadsheet, you would appreciate the value of a system that allows users to create stunning graphs interactively.”

Learn more

VizQL: A visual query language

VizQL has many advantages compared to existing methods for visualizing data

• VizQL is a computer language for describing tables, graphs, charts, maps, time series, tables of visualizations and dashboards. It unifies all of these different visual representations into a simple language.
• VizQL statements define the mapping from records returned from a dataset or database to marks on a visualization (drawing primitives). Some fields in the record are mapped to the geometric properties of the mark, including position, size and orientation; other fields are reflected in visual attributes like color and pattern.
• VizQL is a declarative language. The advantage of a declarative language is that the user describes “what” picture should be created, not “how” to make it. Even better, a declarative approach lets people build up amazing visualizations incrementally, in a process of stepwise refinement.
• VizQL is high performance. It scales to extremely large datasets.

The Company

Tableau Public is a product of Tableau Software. We make fast analytics and data visualization products. Founded by an Academy-Award winning professor from Stanford University, a savvy business leader with a passion for data, and a brilliant computer scientist, we’re trying to solve one of the most challenging problems in software – making data understandable to ordinary people. We’ve become one of the fastest growing software companies in the world.

Why are we launching Tableau Public? We want to help people put data online in ways that are fast, useful and beautiful. We want to improve public information, on the public web, for the public good. We’re starting this mission by launching this free service for bloggers, journalists, citizens, teachers, students, hobbyists and enthusiasts. Our hope is that this will blossom into commercial use by companies and governments. If you’re interested in discussing institutional usage of Tableau Public, please contact us.