Opinions In Social Media

What’s All The Buzz About?

Posted by Chad on Feb 9th, 2010 | View Comments

Google has launched a new social networking platform heavily integrated into its webmail service Gmail. The new platform called Buzz is the latest effort by Google to enter into the social market. Google quickly began to roll the new service out to its current Gmail users and expects that all users will have the Buzz service within a couple of days.

As of this writing I do not have the Buzz feature integrated into my Gmail account but from reading the various blogs that covered the Google press conference this is what is known about Buzz:

  • Auto-following
  • Ability to change the privacy setting on shared content
  • Status updates delivered to your Gmail inbox
  • Ability to recommend posts to friends-of-friends
  • Twitter style @ replies
  • Integration with Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader
  • View image thumbnails within each post
  • Real time updates

You can watch the Google Buzz demo video below:

Why Google Buzz Will Fail

Personally I think Buzz will be a failed product that Google will probably forget about in a year and here are my reasons why:

  • Auto-following – I can’t confirm at this point but I assume what Google means by auto-follow is that anybody you have previously emailed in the past with a Gmail account you will now be following/friending them. If this is how it is intended to work this was poorly thought out by the Google engineers. There are email contacts in my Gmail account that I have sent messages to once and never again. Why would I choose to follow these people? Google and any other company getting into the social networking business should not assume and/or automatically sign you up to follow other users. This type of auto follow is going to lead to artificial follower counts much in the same way as the Twitter suggested user lists did before they changed the format.
  • Facebook Is Missing – I couldn’t help but notice that during their demo video they mention integration with Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader but strangely enough no mention of Facebook. How can Google Buzz claim to be truly integrated with other social networking sites when they don’t even integrate with the 400+ million user juggernaut that is Facebook? Oddly enough I see no mention integration with Google’s other failed social networking platform Orkut either.
  • The Name – Buzz seems to be a poorly chosen name and one that I and many other people already associate with another site. Yahoo currently runs a social news site called Buzz that you can find at http://buzz.yahoo.com and with Google now choosing to also call its social networking platform Buzz this may lead to a fragmented and confused internet audience.
  • Built By Engineers – I have looked at the Buzz profile page for a couple of users such as Mashable who have had access to the service. To be nice…it’s ugly. It’s a plain white page with what appears to be not customization. I realize Google is full of really smart and talented engineers who make a great search product but at some point you would think they could spend some of their billions on hiring some top notch graphic designers and usability experts to ensure they deliver not only a great looking product but one that can be used by your average internet user without help.
  • Cross-Posting – Will Google Buzz be able to post to all my other social network profiles or will it simply aggregate that information to be posted solely within Buzz? If Google was smart they would grant users the ability to post a status update to Buzz and then have Buzz cross-post it to all the users other social networking sites.
  • Email Only – Why did Google make the decision to allow access to Buzz only through Gmail on the desktop? I believe this will only work in confusing their users as most (including myself) thing of Gmail as an email destination and not as a social networking destination. Google is going to have a hard fought branding battle in ensuring that their users remember that Gmail is now more than simple email.
  • Nothing New – Google Buzz adds nothing new to social networking that hasn’t already been implemented better on another site. What incentive is there for a user to leave their current favorite social site and move their social graph over to Buzz?

One Reason Google Buzz May Succeed

  • 146 Million Users – Gmail currently has 146 million users and each and every single one of those users will be getting Buzz rolled out to them in the upcoming days. If everyone of those Gmail users decides to adopt Buzz as their social networking platform of choice that mean Buzz would have 1/4 the amount of users as Facebook only days after initial launch.

From my point of view I think that Buzz will fail as it adds nothing new to the social scent that hasn’t already been done and this feels to much like an effort by Google to show that “Hey, we’re here too, look at us” instead of an actual push into social networking.

Please leave a comment below with your opinion on Google Buzz.

  • Do you think it will be a success or a failure?
  • Have you used it yet?
  • What are your initial thoughts?

For additional reading and sources of information I used please check out:

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