Social Networking: Should Google Buzz stay or should it go?
Posted by Dave on 11 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: Social Media
With 400 million users worldwide, Facebook are clearly the leaders of social networking amongst the online community. Twitter are in a not-so-close second place with a comparatively small “following” (pun intended) of 18 million users. With this many people subscribing to online social networking, it was only a matter of time before online giant, Google, came to the party in anticipation of getting a nice fat slice of the social networking cake. The secret weapon that they’ve been teasing us about for the last couple of months was revealed yesterday and goes by the name of Google Buzz. The question that everyone is asking after day one is: “Will it stay? Or will it go?” I played around with Google buzz yesterday, chatted to friends (online of course) and did a little bit of research into the general online public’s reaction to Google Buzz. This is what I found:
Reasons it should stay:
Getting started on Google Buzz is extremely quick and painless as it automatically integrates your Gmail contacts into your Buzz account. Your contacts (or followers) can then see what you’ve been up to and follow your Buzzes which are basically conversational threads that people can reply to and comment on.
Buzz effectively integrates your blogs and other social networking tools such as Twitter, Flickr, Picasa and of course, Gmail. Pulling in content from these sources is fairly simple and you get to choose who you would like to allow to view each Buzz that you post. So, in a way, Google are onto something here as they’re using Buzz as an aggregation tool to bring all your social networking tools into one controllable hub, and they do it very well.
HOWEVER… where is Facebook in all of this?
Reasons it might go:
As mentioned at the very beginning of this post, Facebook are currently by far the social networking giants with over 400 million users. Google Buzz has absolutely no integration of Facebook whatsoever. This is a massive thorn in their side as not many people can be bothered to manage both their Facebook and Buzz accounts separately, we’re simply too busy for that. Facebook is owned by Microsoft and are therefore obviously not going to be too cooperative in assisting Buzz with integrating the two sites, and why should they?
Privacy is always a massive issue when it comes to social networks. One feels slightly out of control when using Buzz as it does a lot of automatic adding of followers and contacts and there’s always the risk that someone might slip through the net into and into your list of followers without you knowing it. Ben Parr, Co Editor of Mashable used the example of imagining that you had a mistress who nobody knew about, and she was one of your Gmail contacts. She and her photos of you with her, could automatically be added to your list of photos etc. without you knowing it and you could subsequently be busted! Rightfully so yes, you got what you deserve, but the point here is that we all need complete control and privacy, something that many people think lacks with Google Buzz.
The final issue: Despite the fact that you can easily integrate all your other social networking sites into your Buzz page (except Facebook of course), you are unable to post information from your Buzz account back to any of the other networks. EG: you can import your Flickr pics to show on your Buzz account; however when anyone comments on the pics on your Buzz account, these comments do not get posted back to your Flickr account. This results in you having to manage multiple sets of comments and feedback from your Buzz account and the initial source of the information or images. Once again, we’re just too busy.
What does the online community have to say so far?
Social Network news website, Mashable, ran a poll and asked their readers if they would use Google Buzz. Here are the results:
Voting results from social networkers after day one were mixed
So, will it stay or will it go?
It basically comes down to this. Gmail currently have about 36 million users who will automatically be eligible to use Google Buzz. This is a fraction of the amount of people using social network frontrunners – Facebook. Google Buzz is a fairly good tool. It could be worth using and many people will most likely grow to like it (especially once Google irons out any initial problems with the site). However, until Google Buzz manages to find a way to successfully integrate Facebook into their tool, it will never be too much of a threat to the industry as a whole. Yes, Google Buzz will get its little slice of the social networking pie, however as it currently stands; it is unlikely to be too much of a threat to existing social media networks in the long run.
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Tags: facebook, flickr, google buzz, Social Media, social media networks, twitter
February 16th, 2010 at 7:55 pm
“Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.” – wikipedia.org.
Liked the post otherwise. I don’t think Google want to compete with anyone. They just produce cutting edge stuff for fun and the betterment of mankind and to pump their egos and marvel at their own genius. I mean 400 million users – who want’s to arm wrestle with the hulk?