Buzz? They Should've Called It Glue

Buzz is more than an ungainly cross between Twitter and FriendFeed that sits in your Gmail inbox: Google have just invented glue for the web, a way of sticking together every last little thing we say, do, read and view online.

This is a good thing.

I’ve cheered from the sidelines as clever stuff like microformats, OpenID, PubSubHub, RSS and RESTful web APIs matured into the mainstream, and had rather hoped that these ideas would–somehow!–gather together to form an open, distributed, interoperable realtime commingling of all our off- and online activities, identities and relationships.

Buzz looks like it could be that ‘somehow’. It’s just a bit of a shame that Google are doing the gluing, in order to flog more adverts1.

Still, better them than bloody Facebook.