[Infowarrior] - Google Buzz Aims To Social-Network Gmail Users

[Richard Forno]

Google Buzz Aims To Social-Network Gmail Users

Richard Koman, newsfactor.com Richard Koman, newsfactor.com 1 hr 28 mins ago
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20100209/tc_nf/71580/print

Google has watched more or less on the sidelines as social-networking sites -- most notably Facebook and Twitter -- have captured the public's attention. Facebook, especially, has become more than a destination web site. It has become a user-centric world where users communicate via status updates, third-party applications, and shared groups.

While Google has made various attempts to gain traction in the social web, nothing has really worked. So on Tuesday, Google gave notice that it's serious about the social web with its announcement of Google Buzz -- a new feature of its Gmail web-based e-mail system.

Rather than simply adding status updates to Gmail, Google is pouring on the social-networking juice in an attempt to exploit the growing user base of Gmail.

Gmail: Social Network

"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," product manager Todd Jackson wrote in an announcement blog post.

Buzz will take advantage of the social network inherent in e-mail by "automatically setting you up to follow the people you e-mail and chat with the most," Jackson said.

How will this impact Facebook and Twitter? Not too much, said Ben Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, in an e-mail. "It really boils down to Google attempting to get folks to spend more time with their assets," he said. "Time will tell how this works out, but I don't really see this as a threat to Facebook or Twitter, given that neither of those services has been cannibalized by each other."

Buzz is intended to be 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)," Jackson wrote. With Buzz tightly integrated with users' existing Gmail inbox, "you're sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time."

Business Networks?

Buzz may also have a business application, but this is far from clear. Jackson only hinted at business applications. "We also plan to make Google Buzz available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features for sharing within organizations," he wrote.

Google also showed an understanding that social networking is naturally a mobile application. "Mobile devices add an important component to sharing: Location," Jackson wrote. "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."

Jackson also emphasized that Buzz will be leveraged to other Google properties like Google Maps and integrate with applications with open APIs like Flicker and Twitter itself.

"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," Jackson wrote.