Know your address

Sometimes my Gmail account gets emails to it that don’t belong to me. These are usually legitimate emails intended for some probably-distant relation with my last name but a different first name. I can understand that, because it just means that the sender got the address wrong when they sent the email.

However, recently I got a confirmation email for an online purchase under someone else’s name. One of these rogue Casteels purchased something from American Eagle and then put in the wrong email address when they checked out. How do you do that? Don’t you know your own email address?

Buzz Will Work

So if you have a Gmail account you probably noticed last week that Google added a new feature: Buzz. It’s basically Google’s version of Facebook’s version of Twitter. It’s nothing new or exciting, just a new implementation of someone else’s idea.

The really new and exciting part of Google Buzz actually happened this morning, one week after Buzz was launched: My friend Jason started following me on it.

Jason’s like a barometer for how successful technology is, mostly because he’s so resistant to it. His work had to give him a pager to get a hold of him because he didn’t yet have a cell phone when he graduated from college and got a job. That’s why when he eventually got a blog, joined Facebook, and even bought an iPhone, we knew those things were hits.

So, really, I don’t know if Jason is going to actually use Buzz because it gets set up automatically by your Gmail account and you automatically start following your Gmail contacts. But of course, I think that’s exactly why it’s going to work. Jason and other people like him that would probably never bother with fads like Twitter will use Buzz because it’s built in to something that they’re already using.

When Google came out with Google Talk I wrote a short-sighted post about how it was such a bad idea because everyone was already well established with their favorite chat programs. I thought a new chat program wouldn’t succeed because there would be no reason for anyone to switch away from the chat service where all of their friends are in favor of a new one with no users and (at the time) no better features. Time has proven me wrong. What I didn’t foresee was that Google would add it to Gmail and overnight make it so that I had more friends on Google Talk than I had on any other chat service. Now it’s the chat service that I prefer.

I think it’ll be the same for Google Buzz. Buzz isn’t anything really new, but it will work anyway. It will work because everyone will use it. Everyone will use it because they already use Gmail.