Google Buzz: Two Weeks In

What Is It?

Buzz is Google’s status update and messaging service that is built into Gmail. It focuses on staying in touch with the people you email with frequently. As a result, you won’t have to rebuild your social network. Instead, you rely on your existing address book.

In addition, it has no limit on message length, allows threaded discussions, and supports rich media. By commenting on the statuses of others, people also subscribe to those threads via email.

Of course, such a service isn’t something new. However, Google has been able to launch Buzz with great success overnight because of the large installed base it had with Gmail. The numbers are quite staggering as well. Google said there were nine million messages in the first 56 hours and 200 mobile check-ins per minute, and this was even before most people had access to Buzz!

With Buzz, Google has combined both data (contacts) and behavior (social sharing).

The Good

Google Buzz offers a number of benefits:

• Integrated Buzz uses your Gmail account so you don’t need to sign up for yet another service. It also has your friends in place so you won’t have to look for them.
• No Character Limit The 140 character limit in Twitter makes it difficult to put out nuanced messages. In Buzz, you can send a message that’s as short or long as it needs to be.
• Threaded Conversations In Buzz, conversations can be isolated within a thread with the original message being the opening post and all the replies listed below it. Media, like videos and images, can be embedded so you don’t have to leave your window to view them. Google Buzz focuses more on conversational communication than on one-off status updates.
• Filtering The integration within Gmail forces you to actively filter your information stream. There’s no way you’d want your Gmail/Buzz window to fill up with status messages of people that aren’t in your inner circle of friends. At the same time, you’ll be more inclined to filter your own messages, to filter out the noise that you might over other tools like Twitter because they might not be relevant to your Google Buzz friends.
• Muting Similar to being able to mute a conversation in Gmail, Buzz allows you to mute a certain conversation without unfollowing a person all together.
• Uniqueness Because your Buzz contacts are tied into your address book and the connection with your followers is tighter, you might commit to sharing updates that you wouldn’t share elsewhere.
• Public/Private Sharing In Buzz, you can choose to select to set status updates to public (visible to everyone) or to private (only visible to your followers). It’s a rather binary but simpler and better configuration than in Twitter and Facebook.
• Notification You can choose to be notified of thread updates via email, but you can also disable the feature if you don’t want these updates to show up in your inbox.
• Geo-Location With mobile integration and “snaps” (comparable to check-ins on Foursquare), Buzz also offers location-sharing, making it a more integrated service.

For marketers, Buzz underlines the fact that social media is about relevance, trust and attention. The megaphone-style distribution of messages about new products/services, new promotional offers, et cetera will continue to become less accepted and thus less successful.

When successful though, Buzz offers opportunities for marketers to find key influencers as well as compile social profiles of people based on the services they’ve connected to their Google profile.

The Bad

Of course, Google Buzz also has drawbacks:

• Isolation Naturally, the downside of integrating Buzz inside Gmail is that you’ll need to have a Gmail account. Personally, I wasn’t as fortunate to be among the first ones with a Gmail invite and as such, my Gmail doesn’t have the standard “kennethlim” username so I’m using the alternative Google ID. Either way, time will tell whether the features in Buzz are compelling enough to draw people away from their use of other social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Buzz integrates well with numerous other Google services such as Picasa and Reader, and also with some third parties like Flickr and Twitter, but to become a true communication hub, it’ll need to support more services. Microsoft Outlook 2010’s social connectors appear to cope with the integration issue better. There, you can see someone’s latest updates updates as part of the People Pane (which also contains emails, attachments, tasks and meetings).
• Distraction The addition of Buzz to Gmail can act distracting and maybe even overwhelming if email updates are enabled. Distraction can also be caused by the fact that—contrary to Outlook 2010—status updates are not displayed per person but as a list of its own.

In addition to the points above, Google Buzz is not (yet) available on Google’s Apps platform. Adding it to the Apps platform will give organizations that use the service an additional communication tool. Buzz might not kill popular consumer services like Twitter and Facebook. In fact, the popular services will continue to learn from each other and offer what works to their users. However, an enterprise Buzz could slow down services like Socialcast and Yammer.

The Ugly

The initial release of Google Buzz led to a massive outcry on privacy issues. Because your Buzz account is linked to your email, people could figure out your email address. People also have a glimpse into your relationships because it auto-followed everyone you emailed frequently. Google has responded quickly and has replaced the auto-follow feature with a “friend suggest” feature. In addition, it’s also possible to—sort of—disable Buzz now.

The privacy issue is bad enough for adults, consider what it means for children. Google doesn’t have proper COPPA barriers that actually tie into its terms of service (i.e. that children under the age of 13 can’t sign up for Google services). Children aren’t always aware to what extent their content is publicly visible. In that respect, Google Buzz isn’t a step forward in safe and responsible Internet use.

Conclusion

This is my first impression of Google Buzz so far. It’s obviously to early to say what it’ll do to many of the other social services that have spawned the last few years. However, Google does have a scale advantage because of its brand name and its large user base, and other services might feel in their attractiveness to investors, sponsors and advertisers. Buzz also has great potential for SME users if it integrates well with Apps and Docs. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on how it all plays out.

What do you think of Google Buzz?