What’s the most common first tweet that Twitter newbies make? That’s easy: “Trying out Twitter” and variants thereof. Nearly everybody who joins the service starts out in a mode that’s experimental, confused, and–for the rest of us–tedious. Which is okay, because on any given day, only a small percentage of tweets come from beginners.

Of course, there was a time when every Twitter user was a new Twitter user, but it was long before most of us had heard of the service. In fact, at the time it wasn’t even Twitter–it was Twttr.

Google Buzz, however, is different. Google could have launched it as a closed beta a la Google Wave or Google Voice, Instead,  the company decided to skip tryouts and go straight to Broadway, by opening the service up to every Gmail user over the next few few days. To a degree that’s really unusual in the history of the Web, Buzz will be chockablock with millions of confused newcomers all at once. Expect “trying out Buzz” and similar sentiments to be the primary form of Buzzing at first.

I still have access to Buzz only on my iPhone, not via Gmail. I’m only following a few people, and the majority of them haven’t buzzed at all yet. So almost all the buzzes I’ve read so far have been on the Web version’s “Nearby” tab, which simply uses your coordinates to show you updates from people in your general vicinity. A few of them are saying things that are at least vaguely interesting–or, at least, are alerting us to their eating activities. But yup, buzzing at the moment seems to mostly be about Buzz.

(Side note: Yes, that’s my iPhone–most people aren’t aware that the “S” in iPhone 3GS stands for “Short.” I special-ordered an iPhone 3GL…)

Wonder how long it’ll be until enough Buzz users have the knack of the thing that reading it can be as enjoyable a way to waste spend time as perusing Twitter?

 
8 Comments


Read more: Google, Google Buzz, social networking