Buzz Starts Buzzing..!!

Google makes a strong statement with ‘Buzz’ to counter Facebook and Twitter. Google integrated social and local features into Gmail, making it a cocktail with less juice and more wine. This seems to be a great new development, but would it be able to takeover Facebook and Twitter, well for that we would need to wait and watch. Integration with existing social networks is critical for Buzz’s success — especially Facebook and twitter. Also we need to understand that Google has never made a successful social network. Orkut’s success is limited to Brazil and India.

Let’s talk about its merits and demerits:

1. Gmail is very popular and being integrated with it would sure have chance of people using it more often. Comments get sent right to your inbox so it’s easy to keep the conversation going. Seems easy to navigate and user friendly.
2. Import your stuff from Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, and Google Reader.
3. See thumbnails with each post, and browse full-screen photos from popular sites.
4. New posts and comments pop in as they happen. No refresh required.
5. You will be able to import your tweets from twitter.
6. But you won’t be able to publish out to Twitter using Buzz, which makes this all seem less useful. And since Buzz won’t aggregate tweets from your Twitter followers (unless you happen to be following them on Buzz and they also happen to be pushing their tweets into Buzz as described previously), you’ll still have to keep both Twitter and Buzz open to reach all your contacts across both networks.
7. Also a very disappointing fact is Buzz’s completely nonexistent relationship with Facebook.

Considering all this Google is going to have a difficult time building a user base. With more than 400 million users, Facebook is the world’s largest social network. The competition is so fierce that Facebook will eventually launch its own webmail service. You can already send messages to e-mail addresses from Facebook, but the execution isn’t as smooth as it needs to be. The new e-mail plan would address that. This project is Codenamed ‘Titan’, the service would offer users e-mail addresses ending in @facebook.com. With this Facebook would become the largest webmail provider overnight.

What Google has to say about ‘BUZZ’

We’ve blogged before about our thoughts on the social web, steps we’ve taken to add social features to our products, and efforts like OpenSocial that propose common tools for building social apps. With more and more communication happening online, the social web has exploded as the primary way to share interesting stuff, tell the world what you’re up to in real-time and stay more connected to more people. In today’s world of status messages, tweets and update streams, it’s increasingly tough to sort through it all, much less engage in meaningful conversations.

Our belief is that organizing the social information on the web — finding relevance in the noise — has become a large-scale challenge, one that Google’s experience in organizing information can help solve. We’ve recently launched innovations like real-time search and Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step with the introduction of a new product, Google Buzz.

Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.

We’re rolling out Buzz to all Gmail accounts over the next few days, so if you don’t see it in your account yet, check back soon. We also plan to make Google Buzz available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features for sharing within organizations.

On your phone, Google Buzz is much more than just a small screen version of the desktop experience. Mobile devices add an important component to sharing: location. Posts tagged with geographical information have an extra dimension of context — the answer to the question “where were you when you shared this?” can communicate so much. And when viewed in aggregate, the posts about a particular location can paint an extremely rich picture of that place. Check out the Mobile Blog for more info about all of the ways to use Buzz on your phone, from a new mobile web app to a Buzz layer in Google Maps for mobile.

We’ve relied on other services’ openness in order to build Buzz (you can connect Flickr and Twitter from Buzz in Gmail), and Buzz itself is not designed to be a closed system. Our goal is to make Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. We’re building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API, and we invite developers to join us on Google Code to see what is available today and to learn more about how to participate.

We really hope you enjoy the experiences we’ve built within Gmail and for mobile phones. If you want to learn more, visit buzz.google.com. We look forward to continuing to evolve and improve Google Buzz based on your feedback.

Ref: googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/introducing-google-buzz.html