With last week?s rollout of Google Buzz, Google has fired its first serious salvo at Facebook in the battle for the social networking crown. At first glance, Buzz appears to be almost identical, feature-wise, to Facebook?s status updates and content sharing platform?you can post short messages, embed photos, videos and links, comment on other people?s posts, and so on. It?s hard to understand how, apart from integrating pretty seamlessly with your Gmail window, this offers anything that Facebook or Twitter doesn?t.
To understand where Google is going with Buzz, and how this will impact Facebook and Twitter, it?s a good idea to look carefully at what ?social networking? currently means. From providing tools to find and connect with friends, networks such as Facebook and Twitter have evolved into a large metaspace where people share information, both private and public. While interpersonal and closed-group communications still form a fairly large share of activity on Facebook, there?s also been a deluge of photo, video and news sharing. People see cool stuff on the Internet all the time, and they want to share and discuss it. Previously, they would forward this stuff as e-mail, but Facebook and Twitter provide more robust tools to share and discuss content. And they?ve all but killed the much despised ?e-mail forward??significantly cutting down the time an average Internet user spends on e-mail. As another by-product of people constantly being fed with ?streams? of news and information, the need to ?search? for it is also diminished, again hitting Google where it hurts. With people spending less idle time on e-mail and search, Google needed to respond quickly and win back the considerable time and mindspace of users it was losing to Facebook and Twitter.
With Buzz, Google will be hoping that a large percentage of people who spend their idle time reading Twitter streams or their Facebook news feed can scratch the same itch without leaving their Gmail windows. Will this happen?
First, it doesn?t look like Google is overly concerned with Twitter. Twitter has less than 20 million users and is like a huge, virtual ?hipster? bar where people hang out, exchange news and gossip, tell jokes and get to glimpse celebrities. It offers an instant, worldwide soapbox where creators of content can reach a wider audience faster than they dreamed possible. Twitter?s ?retweet? feature is the single most important driver for this (something neither Facebook nor Buzz can currently match) where anything interesting takes on a life of its own and is ?forwarded? many times over, reaching millions of users within minutes. But it?s mostly strangers out there.
In contrast, Facebook is a perpetual house party where all your friends are engaged in incessant gossip, chatter, flirting, jokes, games and banter. It?s a comfortable space with so much more happening, and, unlike on Twitter, you don?t have to be edgy and cool to fit in. Over 400 million users agree. This figure dwarfs Gmail?s 38 million, and this is what Google is going after.
Which is why Buzz offers partial integration with Twitter, but none at all with Facebook. In essence, Google wants Buzz to be the place where you spend a large chunk of what is currently your Facebook time.
But the single most important factor that threatens to kill Buzz even before it has a chance to gain acceptance is the approach Google seems to have taken to privacy. You can?t choose not to have Buzz?it?s there in your Gmail, whether you asked for it or not. Sure, you can jump through a few hoops and practically kill all its functionality, but this is well beyond the abilities of the average user?this is the kind of blatant ?opt-out? design that violates Google?s own much vaunted ?Don?t be evil? philosophy. By default, anyone I reply to by e-mail will automatically be added to my contact list, and make their way into my Buzz ?followers? and ?following? lists as well. Even creepier, these lists are by default available for the whole world to see. Sure, Facebook and Twitter work like that too?but those are platforms I signed up, knowing fully well what I expected from them. I?m not sure I want that from my e-mail solution, and certainly not thrust on me without explicit acceptance.
However, history has borne out that the average user doesn?t really care about these issues?Apple, Facebook and even Google understand that once the initial noise has died down, people will put up with all kinds of questionable policy if the product works for them. Buzz does indeed work fairly well at first glance, and is sure to be improved on by extensions from third-party developers. But will it carve a slice out of Facebook?s pie? Things should get really interesting if and when Facebook rolls out its own e-mail platform. From the looks of it, for the first time, Google is afraid.
?The author is game designer and gaming journalist based in Mumbai