Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Google Buzz Further Bifurcates the Conversation

I post my status messages to Twitter and have them imported as my Facebook status. I occasionally have people @ reply to me on Twitter, but more often I have people like and comment on my Facebook status messages. With Google Buzz I will have my Tweets imported and syndicated (along with blog posts). This adds another place where my posts will be commented on and liked. While Google was very smart in integrating Gmail with the service to guarantee a large user base out of the gate, it didn't solve the underlying problem and actually made the current environment worse.


If Google Buzz provided some way to bring together the reply to Twitter messages and Facebook status messages along with comments on blog posts and other platforms and combined them with messages posted directly on Buzz, they would have something going for them. However, this doesn't appear to be the case.

While everyone says Buzz competes with Facebook and Twitter they are missing the point. With regard to Facebook, the value of the company lies in the information they know about how people are connected to each other. Google wants this information and this can be seen in their other services such as Google Profile. Buzz will provide an accelerated way for Google to gain information about who we are connected to and this is really the center of the product.

As long as Buzz integrates with a large number of other Google products seamlessly it will do more good than harm. From how I have seem my friends use the product so far, it looks like a large number of Google Profiles will be filled as people use the service. This opens the door for social search. This will definitely be a service to keep an eye on as the web continues to evolve.

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