Not many people saw it coming, but it was probably the most logical move for Google to make. They’ve been trying very hard for the past few years to succeed in the attractive yet ultra competitive social networking environment…. and all their previous attempts (Orkut, FriendConnect, flirts with Facebook, twitter…) never got them anywhere.
Seems like the social grail was right in front of them! It was as simple as packing several of their current successful services together (gmail, reader, maps, profiles, picasa…) in a single box: Google Buzz.
G Buzz (which ironically enough takes the name from Yahoo’s social news tool: Y Buzz) was unveiled last Tuesday causing big stir and hype amongst techie blogs, community (mashable, techcrunch… who are btw giving it a big push with their homemade “buzz it” buttons) and on-line newspapers. Even many other direct competitors such as Microsoft or Yahoo had some (not very positive) official reactions minimizing the buzz effect to a mere “copy of what they’ve already been doing for the past few years”.
Google's latest social shot
Google simply got tired of messing around with the big social duopoly Facebook (400m users) and Twitter (75m users) represent and decided that their 176 million Gmail accounts is a high enough number to automatically create a social buzz. Still far away from Microsoft’s 500m hotmail+IM users, but recirculation and integration of their services & mail users had to be made sooner or later; in this way Google can keep monetizing and engaging customers within their own network (and forget, for a minute, about those horrifying ad contracts with other big players)….
Buzz is simply a module added to your Gmail account which lets you share status updates, images and videos as you would do in any other social network, with direct messages, custom texts… but with the streamlined-conversation logic Google has popularised with Gmail. Opening Buzz to their own services (Picasa, Blogger) as well as competitor’s (Flickr, twitter… more to come) is also part of the strategy Google intends to keep in this transparent one-stop social tool.
Not new, not finished
As we’ve already pointed out there’s nothing new in G Buzz apart from finally bringing a unique social stream to Google customers. All previous big players were already showing social streams in their e-mail homepages but no one seemed to revolt or notice. However Google know that their Gmail users seem to be more socially-engaged and participative than those of their competitors (they tweet and use facebook more than Yahoo or Hotmail users), that’s why adding a real-time share tool (not 140 characters-only) directly into their mail goes far beyond from what Msft & Yahoo had done up to now.
Over the past few days Buzz has also been extremely criticized for having (the already characteristic from Google) not-finished not-polished look and feel.
Creating a smashing social network by simply adding streams on your e-mail service is just a feature that cannot (in any imaginable way) compete with FB. Buzz feels like a mere add-on or bad conceived social fix … a mix between Wave & Gmail ……… a cheap social experience in the end.
The idea is great, but a poor profile page + a poor “light” stream box + a poor notification experience + …. = a beta social network, anyway, we were all expecting this weren’t we?
Privacy issues (which have already been solved) like automatic follow system, exposed private gmail accounts and little support to pre-2.0 Android devices have also generated several negative responses from many Google fans. This is the problem when you try to force all your gmail customers to become social fountains overnight.
Probably Buzz will get its very own app soon (it should have been a separate service from start…) and might give us the possibility to detach it from Gmail.
All in all this is the best social experience Google has managed to create so far (and looks like this time is going the right way with all this hype). Some killer ideas like adding a buzz layer to our favourite maps service (with all the review, geotag benefits), if mixed with powerful devices (like the iPhone or Nexus 1) push Google’s services to the next level (and force competition to imagine new features).
great parody about Google Buzz’s ad
Let’s see how long this new adventure lasts for Google and if you get tired of it you can simply click the “turn off buzz” button at the bottom of your Gmail homepage. Oh! We nearly forgot….
