Introducing Google Buzz
February 09 2010 by Tiffany Blosser ~ 0 CommentsToday Google introduced their new trinket– Google Buzz!
Despite earlier attempts to include a social aspect in many of their products, Google is at it again. An event this morning revealed the Google Buzz, an attempt to create a social network inside of Gmail.
Buzz is a stream of status updates, pictures, links, and videos from your friends. You can “like” these items and you can comment on them. It essentially includes elements of Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp and other social elements from other sites, wrapping them together and placing them inside of Gmail.
It’s been compared to FriendFeed. It looks similar and is based on the same concept- consolidating all of your social sites and networks into one stream that you can customize. However, Google says that Buzz has something FriendFeed doesn’t- an already established user base.
This is up for discussion. In some reports, Gmail has 176 million unique visitors in a month. However, Buzz uses your email contact book as a starting basis to pull friend’s activities from. Some argue that not everyone in their contacts and address book is someone they associate with, or if it is, they aren’t someone to be social with, i.e. your boss.
Another shortcoming of Buzz is that, for right now, it’s a one-way street, meaning, you can’t update all of your statuses from one platform. This is something that Google says is coming later.
Will Google be successful this time around as they try their luck in social networks? Tell us what you think. For now, I’m going to play around with Buzz a bit, and see what this thing is all about.
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