Dear Google

I currently have 298 unread emails in my gmail account.

I gave up on my Yahoo mail account after it became clogged with spam.

I use Google Reader once a week to glance through headlines of the few blogs I still read. I'm overwhelmed with guilt every time I use it because so many unread stories have piled up in it since I last looked.

I am a member of Facebook but I keep the number of my friends well below Dunbar's number. I don't know how anyone can claim to have 500 friends, much less 1,000. Same goes for Twitter, I follow 70 and even that is hard. I protect my tweets because I fear saying something recklessly that will come back to haunt me.

In non-virtual world, I subscribe to The Atlantic, Newsweek, the local paper and the New Yorker. The New Yorker might feature the best writing of the bunch. But whenever the latest issue arrives I say to myself, "Dammit, I didn't finish the last one." There's currently a stack of them on my night stand.

So, Google Buzz. You're kidding me, right? Seriously, is this a tool for making my life easier? Or is it rather just another pipe for flooding my life with useless information? I've got enough of those, thanks.

It's getting increasingly hard for me to sift through the noise and find the value. And, here's the irony, your company was originally valuable for doing precisely that. Why did Google rise to the top? Because it sorted through the colossal mess of the internet and gave me the information I wanted. You put customers first and your needs second. That's the way to build market share. It's not built by thrusting features no one asked for onto gmail.

The way I see it, Google Buzz is a purely reactive move motivated by fear of Facebook and Twitter. You're letting your competitors define your moves rather than setting the terms yourself. As a result, you look weak and are saddled with some junky application that has annoyed users like myself. Please, get back to doing what you do best, providing me with technology that will help me with my life.

Sincerely,

-Dave

Comments

[brian]

You do not like them.
SO you say.
Try them! Try them!
ANd you may.
Try them and you may I say.

-Dr. Suess

[Dave G]

We hates the Google Buzz