The author here smartly looks back at some of the initial buzz surrounding Google Buzz to see what it may mean in terms of today’s buzz for Google+.

My initial Buzz post is one of the examples, as I stated the line (which was also my title), “If Google Wave is the future, Google Buzz is the present.”

And while the author gives me credit for a “healthy dose of skepticism” as well, looking over that post, I think a lot of what I wrote was pretty dead-on from a skepticism perspective. There was potential, but I felt like Google would screw it up.

They did.

Google+ is already much better than Google Buzz ever was. That’s not to say they won’t mess it up this time as well, it’s just to say that it will be harder to mess up in such a way because the foundation seems much stronger. 

While Buzz intrigued me a bit at first, within a month (after actually using it quite a bit) I realized what Buzz should have been (but sadly, wasn’t): a location-first mobile service. It was pretty much dead to me from that point on.

Looking back, when I said that “if Google Wave is the future, Google Buzz is the present”, perhaps I was just being prescient. Google Wave, now dead, is clearly not going to be the future. As such, Buzz was never the present.