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Did you hear? On February 9th, Google launched its newest web-based gem: Google BUZZ.
Meant to draw on social features similar to those in Facebook and Twitter, BUZZ shares short messages (though longer than 140 characters), pictures, online videos, and feeds from RSS feeds and the like.
Accessible through Google’s popular Gmail service, BUZZ will simply look like a new part of the inbox. Once configured, feeds from users’ Twitter feeds, Picasa albums, and so on and so forth, will be delivered to your (and your followers’) BUZZ bins. In short, BUZZ is much like a “lite” version of its WAVE application, launched late last year.
It’s possible that BUZZ can be used for business; messages can be linked to geographic locations, so companies that engage that way might find it useful.
But do we really need it? Do our customers want another social site? Do they want to keep track of things on Facebook *and* Twitter *and* on BUZZ? That remains to be seen. And there’s a pretty big hiccup in its potential: you must be a Gmail subscriber to use BUZZ. It’s not very likely that most people will abandon their email service just to use something whose use isn’t yet well-defined.
BUZZ is certainly interesting enough. The social integration make it much like FriendFeed (which was purchased by Facebook in 2009). Multiple profiles can be linked and followed by BUZZ users, and much like in WAVE, users can comment on individual posts, making them more “conversation-like”. But is that really enough?
Some have decreed that BUZZ will “kill” Facebook. That seems to be a bit of a stretch, as Facebook has well over 400 million users (a number that seems to be growing exponentially).
What’s your opinion? Have you checked out BUZZ? Has Google addressed a solution to a problem that didn’t really exist?
