Earlier this year, someone suggested I should write a preemptive obituary for Google Buzz. It was obvious that the service was not going to survive. Google had a new strategy for product development, which they called the "fewer arrows, more wood," and mainly consists of killing off development on their losing products to focus on the winners. You may have recently noticed a warning, and if you weren't paying attention, you may have noticed that Google Buzz was now just completely gone. No more hiding Buzz alerts. No more Buzz listing in Google+. Buzz is gone.
The service, which was originally known internally as "Taco Town," was a Twitter-like social network for posting, and you got there from within your Gmail account.You could import your Twitter feed, but replying to imported Twitter posts didn't rebroadcast the responses back to Twitter (a pity, since that might have saved the service, just like it saved FriendFeed. Well, at least it saved FriendFeed long enough to be purchased by Facebook.) But hey, a social network that used the friends you already had, since you'd been emailing them on Gmail. What could possibly go wrong?
Google Buzz had a privacy misstep almost immediately, since they pre-populated your Google Buzz contacts with your Gmail contacts and listed them publicly. What wasn't a problem with internal Google testers turned out to be a huge problem in the wide roll-out, when people didn't want their business partners, mistresses, and lawyers to get to know each other. It was also a problem that replying to someone identified their Gmail address. Maybe they didn't want to broadcast that.
At any rate, it turns out that not everyone wants to have a big, public, social network that springs forth from their Gmail address. Even after Google corrected the privacy issues, the damage had been done, and Google Buzz never took off. After Google+ came out, it was only a matter of time before Google Buzz followed Google Wave with that big Google goodbye.
Retrieving Your Google Buzz Posts
Hey, you might think, I actually used Google Buzz for a while, and I once had a very profound posting that a lot of people liked, er, +1ed. Now it's just gone. What do I do? I'm glad you asked. It turns out there is a roundabout way to get your data, although I can't tell you how long this will last.
Google's Data Liberation Front made a tool to get your posts. They're not really in a great format for doing anything other than looking, but at least you've got your posts. Maybe you can copy and paste them into Google+.
- Go to Google Takeout.
- You'll see a whole series of services with data you can export. You can even retrieve those old Knols.
- Click on Choose Services.
- Select Google Buzz.
- You'll see an estimate of how many files and how much space it uses.
- Click Create Archive.
- Wait for the archive to be created.
- Click Download.
- You may need to log in again.
- Wait for download to complete.
If you had pictures you shared through Google Buzz, those pictures will still be in your Picasa Web Album. If you cross-posted from Twitter, your Twitter will still remain. This is just a way to retrieve the text you typed into Google Buzz.
