Give me a Buzz

The big news of today/yesterday is that of Google's new product in the social networking world, Buzz. I seemed to be one of the last people to have the feature activated so I have been holding out until I had the chance to use it before I decided what to make of it. First of all, at the moment, it stands very little chance of taking a chunk out of twitters market. There have already been privacy concerns about the default sharing settings and I think Google have bitten of a bit more than they can chew. Quite simply, there have set out to copy - which is usually a bad start because as with most things, the originals are the best. Twitter is good not because of what it set out to be, but what it has become. A sort of emergent behaviour that has taken the world by storm and in the past couple of years it has been transformed from something no one needed to something that people would now be lost without.

At the moment, the only advantage that Buzz does have is that - in a similar fashion to facebook - it can draw information in from a variety of sources, twitter being one of them but also flickr, YouTube etc and can publish them to your feed. My buzz currently has 7 'associations' that are feeding the data that I already have to one place. I have 0 followers and and following 0 people. Primarily, this is because I know of only three people who have Google accounts, one of them is my mum - who doesn't read my twitter updates and is blocked from reading my facebook updates so I wouldn't want to 'add' her, the other two are people I would only very occasionally send emails to and other than that have no electronic relationship and wouldn't really want to either.

So if I am following 0 people and 0 people are following me, them what really is the point in having a Buzz at all? Well, at the moment, there isn't one. There are no celebrity presences - that I know of - and no institutions have announced that they will be Buzzing (if that's what it is going to be called) so as far as I can see it is useless.

On a better note, I have had a breakthrough with by dissertation experiment and now believe it will be possible (albeit quite awkward) to merge MATLAB and Flash together so that I can execute code in MATLAB and show a visualisation in flash based on the output. There are still a few things to iron out, granted, they are quite important ones but I remain optimistic that there is a way.

The first lecture of my second module began today and was actually quite funny. The lecturer is quite animated and so I can't see them being too boring which is a major advantage in a two hour lecture. A lot of the content seemed to be very similar to the things I have been hearing about on the BBC's Virtual Revolution programme although in a way I suppose they are talking about pretty much the same thing. The title of the module is The Intelligent Web and there were some amazing statistics that he came up with about the content of the web, which is apparently only 25% original content and 75% replicated and also 75% is not related to any business or institution i.e. this blog! It has given me high hopes that this will be an interesting module but I will reserve that judgement until I have sat though a few more of them.

Last little rant is courtesy of Tesco and their online shoppers. I can understand the point of replacement products because that is what you would do if you were shopping yourself, choose a suitable alternative or decide that you can do without so I'm not knocking the idea. I was also pleased to see them introduce the scheme that means you are not charged any extra for the replacement product, even if it is worth more. Unfortunately I think that may have forced them to be more selective about their choice of replacement. I.e. you order value beans - do you get Heinz beans instead? In this case, the two products that were unavailable were a jar of rosemary and a 1kg bag of raisins. The alternatives that were picked were a jar of thyme and a 375g bag of raisins. First of all, how does thyme replace rosemary? Admittedly if you are going purely by appearance, they are probably the most similar, woody and needly but they are miles apart in taste. Secondly, the raisins, at first glance, not a problem until you see that they are practically the same price for 3/4 of a kilo less! Needless to say they both went back with the driver, seriously, they should have an option to send the shopper for retraining at the end of the bill!