But it sure is addictive. I was skeptical at first, but within moments ended up embroiled in this:

And that is just a single Buzz. So… yeah.

I’m surprised at how quickly everyone seemed to jump on the Buzz bandwagon. Normally, at least amongst the folks I know, there’s a period of skepticism that follows the announcement of a new technology or service. Then the few technology junkies will bravely step forward to try it out, and if it’s good, they’ll hook everybody else in. This did not happen with Buzz. Everyone jumped on Buzz at the same time. All day I was pummeled with posts from people far and wide, not all tech junkies either. Most were friends that I haven’t spoken to in a long long time. Suddenly we were chatting like we just saw each other yesterday. It was fantastic. Facebook has never even come close to bringing me in touch with so many friends in such a short time.

So that’s the good side of Buzz. The bad side is… well, all day it was like this constant, incessant, um, buzz in the background, sabotaging my every attempt to be productive. I filtered out Buzz announcements in my Inbox. I turned off new Buzz notifications. It was no use. I felt drawn to it like a… bee to honey. That was awful. Oh yeah, and the pun-tastic simile was pretty bad too.

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So, FOWD. My first conference! FOWD stands for Future of Web Design. If you are a cool British person like the organizers of this event, you can pull off simply saying “foe’d.” (In Americanese this would be more like “fowl’d,” which is aurally less appealing.)

I think I’m going to write 2 separate blog posts. One now for general impressions/thoughts, one later for specific things that I want to retain. This one’s for general impressions. Here goes:

How to describe the day? It was a dazzling mélange of technological wizardry, smart people, and dorky jokes, with a few controversial manifestoes thrown in there. Contests were held, Twitter was leveraged, and WIFI capacity was systemically overwhelmed. The talks were all very fun to watch. Quite a few of them felt like watching my tech/design RSS feeds come to life in high-definition 4D. Which is exciting. (Later on, I got to meet Jason Santa Maria, whose blog I follow. The resolution of Jason Santa Maria’s face is tech-defyingly high in real life. Actually I think I may have freaked him out a bit by poking his arm to verify that he was real.)

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