I’ve been reading David Pogue’s review of Google Buzz , as well as Mathew Ingram’s analysis at GigaOm. I will echo their sentiments: Buzz’s design for pushing a few characters out to the Internet is overly complicated. As a reader of Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things, I immediately recognized that Google was trying to improve on a simple, useful Internet utensil.
The lesson from Petroski’s books is that adding more than four tines, or combining the fork with the knife and spoon won’t improve the function. Google and others: leave this microblogging fork alone!
There’s always room for improvement and cosmetics tweaks, but Twitter suits me and lots of other just fine. This start-up has succeeded in evolving the legacy online bulletin-board to a pretty stable and socially useful point.
It’s the same with physical artifacts—eating utensils, paper clips, staples,pins,etc.–that reach a form that doesn’t require a make-over. Our current four-tined fork comes out of a design that gained acceptance … in the eighteenth century.
Yes, Google’s search function design is the embodiment of simplicity, but with Buzz they have strayed from their principles.
Note to Google engineers who designed Buzz: re-read Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things.