At least two people in the Googleverse are underwhelmed with Buzz; me and internet maven Richard Scoble. Scoble bats first…

“Together with a lot of web workers, I depend on being able to skim through information sources quickly. Services like Google Reader are well-optimized for doing this, especially in List mode. (To turn on List mode, from the “All Items” view, click on “Show: List” in the blue bar at the top right of the screen.)

The List views in Gmail and Google Reader make it easy to look at the subjects of posts, and scroll through them quickly. Google Buzz, unfortunately, uses the threaded conversation approach of Google Wave, but without the tools for controlling what appears on the screen that Wave has.

I hope that the limitations of Google Buzz’s interface are just growing pains. Maybe the designers of Buzz didn’t anticipate that some posts would generate hundreds of comments. So let’s hope that they’ll give us the tools to use the service efficiently, or, as one commenter suggests, Google Buzz users might give up on it before it’s a week old.” Source: Google Buzz: Not Efficient? – WebWorkerDaily

On his own blog, Scoble goes on to say…

“OK, now I’ve had a bit of time to play with Google Buzz and everywhere I look I see a badly-executed copy of FriendFeed.

With two important exceptions:

1. Google Buzz actually has a lot of users and much better information flowing through its veins. There’s a reason that FriendFeed doesn’t have many users: it has some very anti-user features that retard user adoption (back when I was excited about FriendFeed I kept hoping that FriendFeed was going to fix some of their issues).
2. It has pretty nice location features built in, especially if you use Google Maps on Android.” Source: Google Buzz copied FriendFeed’s worst features, why?

If you want to read the rest of his rant, go to the source. Here’s my random list of pet peeves…

• I don’t even like to get electronic newsletters because they’re a distraction; email is for email and needs to be segmented from social media…
• Information comes into Buzz, but it can’t get out; no rss output for the things I want to share
• Insufficient keyboard shortcuts; what happened to e for email like Reader? Google Reader is perfect for my needs — Buzz is like a fly droning around my head while I’m trying to concentrate…

What do you think?