Let’s move on, though. Is Buzz any good?

As an information consumer, it’s probably fairly good. You have a friend who is active on the Internet, or want to follow a celebrity, it’s now a click away. One stop, and you see just about their entire presence on the web.

©google.com

As an information producer, it seems ok as well. You can stop linking your Twitter account to your Facebook, and your Facebook account to Google Reader. You can stop sending Google Reader posts via email. Use whatever information source is convenient, and your followers will see it.

It falls apart a bit, in my opinion, for people who are both consumers and producers. If I create a blog entry, or a Tweet, it shows up in my own Buzz. Why would I want to see my own stuff? Ok, that can probably be turned off easily (I haven’t discovered how). Also, any time I use one of those content producers (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube), then whatever I see on there I will see duplicated when I look at Buzz.

If their intent was that you were supposed to do everything through Buzz, then why have it aggregate at all? To give people a reason to use it until it slowly replaces everything else? Now that I type that, I realise that that may be partly the intention.

I suppose you would call the GMail integration the “client”. It’s not great, though. There are a few things that aren’t bad, such as the live updates. They’re not quite live, though. There’s still a refresh button. That adds confusion. Some things are interactive, some are not. The inbox integration is a disaster. Who in their right mind even conceived of that? Any comment on anything by anyone including yourself is sent to your inbox? Who do I punch in the throat? Glad the filter solution didn’t take long to show up!

I see several areas where it adds complexity and confusion. Particularly if you’re not savvy enough to squelch it. When I post a twitter, I don’t expect a reply to show up in my email. Only, it’s not an email any more. You may not notice, but it’s now a Buzz, so your reply is public and added to the live feed.

I’m all for blurring the line. I’m not sure doing that by moving the line around so fast and counter-intuitively that you lose track is the best approach.

For me, it smells a bit of the Wave project group scrambling to get some use out of the code library they must have spent millions building.

Buzz is an excellent name for this. It’s a noise aggregator. I, for one, don’t want to aggregate noise. I’m willing to see how it develops. I hope they smooth it out quickly. I will only tolerate gnats buzzing around my ears for so long before I just take my beer and retreat inside.

I answered my questions pretty quickly. I’m missing out on some really impressive games and, yes, the hive-mind that is the Internet does remember with fondness the old games I used to play. I discovered something else I didn’t know about. Long play’s, Let’s plays, and Speedruns. Oh, my!

cc-by-sa:Flickr:moparx

They’re all closely related. You’ll either enjoy them, or find them mind-numbingly boring. I don’t think these have middle ground: they’re videos of people playing video games. For some reason, I’m in the “enjoy” group. If, from that description, you think you’re in the “boring” group, then move along. There is nothing for you here.

Long plays and Let’s plays are almost identical. Both record an entire game or, at least, one possible path through a game. Start to finish. The former is usually just the game play, and the later has the player narrating in some fashion.

Speedruns are recordings where the player tries to complete a game in the fastest possible time. These also fall into many categories. 100% Speedruns, for example, show the character picking up all objects (coins, power-ups, treasures). Tool-assisted speedruns (TAS), are games recorded using an emulator. This lets the player rewind the action or slow it down. Usually restricted to old console games, the end result is a video where the player performs perfectly. Glitch games use in-game bugs or errors to gain advantage, with the intent of triggering the end-game in the shortest time possible.

You’ve made it this far so it seems you have at least a curiosity. I’ll give you some examples to get you started.

• Let’s Play World of Warcraft: What a game to tackle! It looks like this guy has been at it for quite a while. It’s a series of over one hundred 10-minute YouTube videos showing a character levelling from 1 to 80. He records at 4x speed, then narrates over the resulting high-speed video.
• Long Play Commodore 64 Games: This user is one of many who has a collection of old C-64 game videos. Most are limited to the 10-minutes available to a single video on YouTube.
• Speed Run System Shock 2: A complete play through of a game that can take days to complete. Or 36 minutes, in this case.
• Glitch Run Tomb Raider Aniversary: A good example of a Glitch run. Uses bugs to walk through walls, walk on air, and skip doors.
• TAS Super Mario Brothers: Mario played like no human can. How far did you get in 5 minutes and 34 seconds?

Still here? Why? It looks like you may suffer a similar chemical imbalance that I’m starting to think effects me. To find more of these, simply search on YouTube for “long play”, or “let’s play”. Look for videos organised into YouTube Playlists. They’re easier to watch and are more likely to be a complete set. You can also visit the dedicated (yeah, go figure) site http://speeddemosarchive.com, or visit the video games section of the more generalised site http://www.archive.org.

If there is real value in these, I suppose it is that you can view them to determine if the game you intend to buy is actually worth the money. No. Not really. They’re just a way to kill time while you wait for your lithium prescription to be delivered.