Google Buzz Makes Other Social Networks Terrified
Posted by admin on February 12th, 2010
Hey! Follow me on Google Buzz!
Google Buzz is a bit of old with a lot of new. It takes the features that people love out of other social networks, improves them, and mushes it all together for you to read and interact with inside your Gmail Inbox. Though it has been receiving some positive buzz lately, there are still many skeptics out there that don’t see a use in it because to some, reading tweets on Twitter, for example, seems more at home. But Google Buzz is much more than a place to check out content provided by other sites. It’s also a social network in itself, and if you have been living under a rock this past decade and haven’t bothered with the whole MySpace, Facebook, Twitter thing, that’s okay.
You can make a Google Buzz account and post whatever you want, wherever you want, and however you want – the vitals of technological convenience that any social network should have if it wants to leave any sort of mark in the industry.
Google Buzz is a new social network – so what? Social Networks come and go these days and it seems that right when you are getting used to the “new” one that everyone is playing with on their iPhones, something better comes along and you are forced to switch over. You have so many “friends” that you just have to check at two or three different social networks daily, don’t you? Don’t you? Yes, you know you do, and it gets to be too intense sometimes. Google wants to fix this problem, let’s see if they do.
Let’s start with Orkut, Google’s own Facebook/MySpace competitor that hasn’t really made much of an impact yet. You can post things, it has friends lists, really good discussion tools, and has that familiar social network feel. But what has Google done to themselves? Google Buzz has all of the features listed above and even more, and Google knows they are going to have to add heavy Orkut integration soon. Should Orkut be afraid? More than anybody; Orkut is going to slowly be phased out as Google Buzz grows and we will soon see most of the Orkut features in Google Buzz – but it’s okay, they are both owned by Google.
Many people haven’t realized that Google Buzz has an amazing location aware posting system. You can post (much like a check-in on other sites) from wherever you are from your mobile device or computer – it then notifies your followers on Google Buzz where you are. Ever since Apple allowed in-browser location support in iPhone OS 3.0, Google has been loving every minute of it. They updated their mobile Google Maps page, allowed Google Search to see where you are, and even finish Google Latitude – another simple Google tool that allows you to see where your friends are – much like Brightkite and foursquare.
All of the features that you find on Google Latitude, Brightkite, and even foursquare, are already found inside Google Buzz. Do these sites need to be afraid? You bet. Almost no other social network out there has a location aware check-in feature built in, unless that’s the sole purpose of the network (like Brightkite and foursquare). Because Google Buzz has this already built in there will be no use for an external network to tell other networks like Twitter or Facebook where you are so your friends can see. Why would you go to another site to tell another site that has all your friends where you are?
Now let’s get to the obvious one: FriendFeed. FriendFeed has been doing what Google Buzz is now doing for a long time now. It has support for hundreds of social networks and takes all of the different live feeds and puts them into a single timeline for you to follow and post from. It has support for followers and over the years it has gotten even simpler to use. So should FriendFeed be worried about Google Buzz? Nope, Facebook just bought them.
Just to throw this out there, there’s a good chance that you’ll eventually find the features of FriendFeed that we know and love natively inside Facebook. This means that you won’t have to install a million apps and import RSS feeds from all of your other social networks to get it to show up in your stream. This will be Facebook’s answer to Google Buzz, and will be the only thing saving Facebook from becoming another Pownce.
What about Twitter? Unfortunately, unless Google decides to buy them like they have talked about before, the simple social networking site may start to lose more and more traffic. Google Buzz does what Twitter does and a lot more. Unless Twitter decides to add support for multimedia like Facebook and Google Buzz instead of just tweeted links, and possibly even a native location aware check-in system, then people are going to ultimately grow tired of their 140 character limit.
So let’s see what happens as Google Buzz gains momentum and support for other social networks. Will these mentioned sites hurt? Probably. Will they get more popular when Google Buzz gets support for them? Probably not. Google isn’t trying to take over the Internet, it just kind of happens.
Hey! Follow me on Google Buzz!
Tags: Brightkite, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, Google Buzz, Latitude, Orkut, Pownce, Social Network, Social Networking, Twitter