Google Buzz: What’s the “Buzz?”

Good morning and welcome to “Google Buzz.”

I was greeted with this new social network that has  automatically found my friends list and added them for me.  I took a look around, edited some of my profiles and content, and am now waiting to see what happens!  From what I’ve read so far there are mixed feelings on whether it will be the new social media revolution and be used by corporations, as well as individuals, to brand themselves.

Will it be embraced as the new “hot spot” or will it be a nuisance?  How soon before Mafia Wars and Farmville show up?  Oh please, no more teddy bears, hearts or flowers?  How will Buzz position itself in the big picture of Facebook/Twitter/Myspace/FriendFeed and the myriad of other networks?

My experience with Google products has been good, I enjoy the simplicity and ease of use of most of their tools.  We can only hope that Buzz will KISS (keep it simple, stupid).

Shane Richmond from the Telegraph:

It’s hard not to be underwhelmed by Google Buzz, which was widely trailed earlier this week as being Google’s Facebook/Twitter-killer. It’s unlikely to kill either of those services since it doesn’t seem to add anything significant to what they do and it appears not to take any of the existing functions of Facebook and Twitter and do them better.

Google Buzz is better thought of as simply another social media aggregator. As Paul Buchheit, the former Google engineer who created Gmail and founded social aggregator FriendFeed, put it: “There’s a FriendFeed in my Gmail.”

Still, as with most new social networks, it’s hard to judge Google Buzz at this point. It’s like being one of the first at a party. Perhaps nobody will come or perhaps everyone will show up and it will be great.

Google has gone some way to dealing with this problem by turning Buzz on for anyone with a Gmail account and then auto-following certain people on your behalf based on who you email most often. This is the one key advantage Buzz has – the potential to tap into a huge, already-existing network. The problem is that unless those people actually do something there remains disappointingly little buzz.

There are plenty of possibilities for how Google Buzz will develop but it looks, at this point, like a service for people who spend most of their time using email and very little on social networking sites – if they’re even on them at all. However, these people have lots of friends on social networks and Buzz provides them with a lightweight way to keep up without leaving the comfortable surrounds of their email.

For it to be anything more than that, Google needs to offer some killer features.

Techcrunch says:

“Hope everyone is ready for an onslaught of brands on the service! Need I remind you that Google Buzz just launched yesterday?”

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Buzz is making my head spin with just-too-muchery (trueslant.com)
• Google Buzz isn’t new and isn’t needed, say rivals (telegraph.co.uk)
• Google Buzz Is Google’s Approach to Sharing and the Social Space [Social Networking] (lifehacker.com)