It didn’t take long for Google’s foray into the social media realm. Google describes it as a “a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting and share updates, photos, videos and more.1″ Google’s Buzz takes aim squarely at Twitter and Facebook. Google wants the first destination when logging onto the internet to be your GMail account. Since it cannot compete directly with those established brands it had to do something different. They created Buzz, “a distributed social networking service.” It acts as an organizer for all the social media. People within the industry did not seem to surprised at the news. Apparently, Google has been trying to make Gmail into something more than just e-mail for quite sometime.
While Google may not be reinventing social media as we know it, it is certainly making an effort to streamline it. If you can’t beat em’ join em’ or in this case make it your one stop shop for em’. I’ve never been too into the Facebook or Twitter phenomenon but putting everything in one place just makes sense. The Feed seems to be an area of the biggest improvement. Just as you search google and are presented with the results in relevant order so will the ‘news feed’ in Buzz. Facebook and Twitter inundate you often times with useless or uninteresting posts. The user becomes the filter and must search out what he/she wants to know. Buzz uses algorithms to present you with relevant, interesting information you want to see. A great comparison can be drawn between what Google is trying to do with Buzz and what Microsoft is trying to do with Bing. Buzz tries to organize the way we interact and communicate with people on the internet. Bing tries to organize the way we search the internet. This is made more interesting by the fact that Bing is a direct shot at Google’s bread and butter, the search. Microsoft is a stakeholder in Facebook.
