Google unveiled ?Google Buzz? on February 9, their latest push into the social networking space in the recent times. There have been mixed reactions to Google Buzz on the Web, from ?totally game changing? to ?late, boring, and lame?. Google Buzz has elements of Twitter, FriendFeed, FourSquare, Disqus and Facebook in it. Google has made a very smart move by putting the Buzz icon right on the left panel of your Gmail inbox. By integrating Buzz into Gmail, Google will make the adoption of Buzz very fast, from zero to potentially tens of millions of users in a matter of hours.
Within the first week of launch, Google Buzz got criticised for lack of privacy. The way it worked was like this: you automatically follow everyone in your Gmail contact list, and that information is publicly available in your profile, by default, to everyone who visits your profile! In its original form, Buzz automatically added contacts to Buzz, possibly exposing business partnerships or relationships that the company would rather not be known publicly.
On February 15, Google apologised for the privacy flaws. The latest move replaces the controversial ?auto-follow? feature with something Google calls ?auto-suggest?. As a result of continued complaints, Google said Buzz will no longer automatically connect users based on their email and chat usage. Instead, the service will offer a list of suggested connections for the new user to accept or reject. Google has made multiple updates to Buzz to address privacy concerns.
Google Buzz has some very cool features. Some of the key features include automatic suggested friends? lists; rich fast-sharing combines sources like Picasa, Twitter, Flickr into a single feed; public and private sharing; inbox integration (Gmail updates dynamically with all Buzz thread content).
Google Buzz has a pretty awesome mobile integration. Buzz lets you ?checkin? into your location. Buzz queries the phone for the best GPS coordinates and uploads that info to Google?s cloud, which figures out where the user is at that time and sends the info back to the phone. The Buzz app then asks a user if he or she is where the phone believes them to be. Its integration into Android lets you make a layer on Google maps. You can follow Buzzes near you, and find ?what is buzzing near me?. All this is available in Android and iPhone at this point. Conversation bubbles will appear on your Google Maps. They are geotagged buzz posts, which lets you see what people are saying nearby. The geo-location magic happens in the ?nearby view? in the application. This view shows public buzz that has been tagged with a location near a user, which will include Buzz from people users don?t necessarily follow.
From this nearby view, users can also select a specific place from the list of nearby places and view posts attached to that place. Pretty cool technique to know what?s happening at specific places near you, for example traffic jams, discount-sales, product launches, etc.
Buzz?s integration into Google Reader, Picasa, Flickr and Blogger allows you to aggregate your content and present it in the Buzz interface. This makes your content much more ?social? and viral. More people are able to see your shared content on Google Reader, in real time. Same with Flickr and Blogger. You will automatically share your content on Flickr and Blogger on Buzz. This is a very powerful method to share content.
So, what other cool things does Buzz support? Buzz lets you format your posts. Neither Twitter nor Facebook allows that. When posting in Buzz, you can format text just as you can in Gmail chat: *bold*, _italics_, or -strike- through- all work. Buzz lets you post into someone?s inbox by using the @reply sign. If you want to make sure one of your friends sees a certain Buzz post, you can direct it to their inbox with an @reply. Type the ?@? symbol followed by the first few letters of their name, and select their email address from the list. In Buzz, you can mute posts so they don?t get sent to your inbox?you can hear the things that you want to hear and mute other posts.
Some people did not like Google Buzz, saying it?s late, boring and lame. Silicon Alley Insider says, ?But like many Google services, it lacks any imagination or compelling reasons to use it. Four hundred million people are already happily using Facebook, and tens of millions (or hundreds of thousands) are using the other services. Why would they switch to this Google service when there are no compelling reasons to do so??
After the first week of use, tens of millions of Gmail users created more than nine million posts and comments. Buzz?s viral nature had many users comparing it to Facebook and Twitter. Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management at Google, said ?Google Buzz is not intended as a challenge to Facebook or Twitter, but as a unique complement to those Web services.?
?It?s not just status-casting. It?s not just checking in. It?s really meaningful interactions around meaningful topics within Buzz and it?s reaching the right audience and people are engaged. That kind of value proposition is I think unique to Buzz. I?ve heard that again and again. In the realm of positive feedback, I think that people are finding that the conversational mode of buzz is very, very powerful and the quality of audience is also great.? Horowitz said in an interview February 17.
In my opinion, the success or failure of a Web Application is determined by the following factors: a) integration with other Web applications, b) ease of use, c) virality of the application, d) speed of access and e) mobile access. Google Buzz, I think, scores very high in each one of these. Think about how you use Google in your life ? Google search is synonymous to ?search?, Gmail is used by 176 million people, Google Maps is used by everyone, Android is the Google mobile platform. Google can easily integrate Buzz with most of its applications. Buzz is super-easy to use, sharing is easier than on other social networking platforms. By integrating Buzz with Gmail, Google has made Buzz super-viral; adoption of Buzz will be fast, likely to be a hockey-stick curve.
With Google?s infrastructure, application speed and reliability of Buzz will be better than most other Web applications. Google will well integrate Buzz with Google Maps and Android, making it irresistible on a mobile phone.
Overall I am very impressed by Google Buzz. It will take a few weeks or months to get widespread adoption, but it will eventually happen. It will not replace Twitter or Facebook, but it will create a new segment of social sharing that will become very popular very integrated and super easy to use.
The writer is co-founder and VP, engineering, Pubmatic