Tim O’Reilly on Google Buzz:
In some ways, Gmail Buzz brings many of the benefits of Google Wave to Gmail. Every Buzz item can be turned into a conversation (much as in Wave or Friendfeed.) People can comment on your Buzz, comment on your comments, or @ reply you. Sure, it lacks the hyper-cool wiki-style shared editing features (though those perhaps could be added in a future release), but it also lacks the critical flaw that made Wave into more of a “concept car” than a real product: I don’t have to adopt a new tool or build a new social network. It just adds rich new capabilities into the tool and network that I already use.
I noted the Waves thing while watching the presentation live, when the real-time search results were populating the inbox. Very cool.
This is what Waves should have been from the very beginning: an addition to Gmail, instead of a brand-new, completely incompatible medium. While I loved the Waves concept and ran right out to get an account as soon as possible, I stopped using it almost immediately because it failed to interoperate with email. The newest version of Gmail solves that.
So I don’t think the innovation is Buzz, because Buzz is just a Twitter me-too. The innovation is that Google took (much/most of) the power of Waves and crammed it into Gmail, where it should have been from the very beginning.
