There’s a new “Buzz” about the Internet and its coming from Google who have just launched a new social networking tool to compete with the likes of Twitter and Facebook.
Over the next few weeks Gmail users will start to see the Buzz tab appear on their inbox which will allow them to share updates, photos, and videos with their friends. They don’t have to do anything as their regular contacts will already be arranged in an “auto-follow” list.
So will Google make a dent in other social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook?
Google already tried a form of social networking six years ago when they launched Orkut, incidentally the same year that Facebook was born, and although it saw a measure of success in Brazil and India, the rest of the world just didn’t take it on.
So what makes Google think they will get it right this time round?
“Buzz is like an entirely new world inside of Gmail,” Google Buzz product manager Todd Jackson said.
“If I want to post [items] publicly I can share them to the world. Anything I post publicly will go to my followers and my Google profile.
“But I can also share privately. It’s easy to post to groups and also easy to create custom groups.
“We paid attention to these little details as we heard from users this was too hard to do on other websites.”
Google have tried to take some of the distinguishing features from both Twitter and Facebook and incorporate them into Buzz and add to that the ability for Buzz replies to be posted directly into a user’s gmail inbox instead of logging in to a separate system and you have a neat little package that makes it easier to keep track of who’s saying what.
Personally though I don’t think it will have too much of an impact on Twitter and is unlikely to win in a face off against Facebook, still, it’s an ingenious move to set buzz inside an already successful service like Gmail which has over 170 million users, so you just never know.
The application will also be available on mobile phones and as Google have integrated Buzz with its maps, when a user posts a status update from their phone it will attach the location of the user to the message.
Public messages will be searchable and viewable directly from your phone so “you can see what people in your neighbourhood are saying” said Google.
Now that’s cool.
