Will Google Buzz Swat Facebook's Popularity?

In Articles by Athena IT Limited, 06 May 2010

In February 2010, Google launched its social networking tool, Google Buzz to the usual fanfare and chest-thumping that has become the norm for Google product launches.Google claimed that they had developed a social networking tool that would trump the likes of Facebook and Twitter, both in terms of usability and customer satisfaction.

Facebook has over 400 million active registered users (according to Facebook’s own statistics). Google Buzz piggybacks on Google's email reader, Gmail, which has approximately 176 million users.

Both Buzz and Facebook enable their users to communicate in real time with their friends and share pictures, videos, and other online content.

The advantages that Google Buzz possesses over Facebook are summed up in the five points below:

1. Seamless Integration - Buzz offers seamless integration with Google's email reader, Gmail.
This allows Gmail users to sent direct messages to their email contacts by simply typing “@” followed by the email address of the contact. While Facebook messages can also be viewed in email readers if a user has enabled email notifications, Buzz’s direct messages offer greater convenience.

2. Compiles Online Activity of Contacts - Buzz automatically compiles the recent online activity on other websites (Twitter, Google Reader, Flickr, etc) of your email contacts. This allows you to enjoy all the unique services each of those websites has to offer from within Google Buzz.

3. SEO Advantage - Buzz offers SEO (search engine optimization) advantages to its users in that all public posts are searchable and can be viewed by anyone if they show up as Google search results. This has been achieved without compromising on users’ privacy – the posting window on Buzz has a drop-down menu to set a post as either public or private. Private posts will only be viewable by your friends.

4. Relevance - Buzz employs an innovative algorithm to determine the relevancy of each post in your news feed based on your likes and dislikes, what the post contains, the number of comments it has received, and your location. The relevancy of the post determines its position in the news feed; the most relevant posts will appear at the top of the news feed while the uninteresting ones are collapsed.

5. Mobile Support - Buzz supports many mobile phone platforms including iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian 60. Users with GPS-enabled phones can view posts based on their locations, as Buzz’s mobile service is integrated with Google Maps. Buzz also supports voice recognition on some smartphones.

Granted, whilst Google Buzz is 6 years behind Facebook, and several other Google products such as Google Wave and Orkut haven’t caught on despite all the hype they obtained upon launch. However, Buzz is opening up enormous possibilities for social networking.

In short, in this authors view Google Buzz is becoming a supplement to a user’s social networking activity on Facebook and not a replacement.

Tags: social network facebook feed google buzz