Outwitting Twitter?

The simplicity that has made Twitter a huge hit is also somewhat limiting, writes the New York Times. Enter Google Buzz, a new networking site that overcomes the limitations. “At its heart, Twitter is dead simple: you type little messages into the box at Twitter.com — news, jokes, observations. Your messages show up on the screens of your followers, whoever’s signed up to receive them. That simplicity has made Twitter a huge hit. But “simple” usually means ‘limited,’ and Twitter is no exception. Your messages can’t be longer than 140 characters. There’s no text formatting. You can’t paste in photos or videos. There’s no filtering of messages. No way to rank or rate people or their utterances. No way to send messages out to canned groups of people, like Family or Co-workers. Google Buzz overcomes all of that. It’s a lot like Twitter (with huge helpings of FriendFeed.com thrown in), but there’s no length limit on your messages. You can search for messages, give certain ones a ‘thumbs up’ (you click a button labelled Like as you do in Facebook). You can forward messages by e-mail. Comments and replies to a certain post remain attached to it, clumped together as a conversation. You can link to your Flickr, Picasa or YouTube accounts, making it easy to drop a photo or a video link into a Buzz posting.”