Written by james | 10 February 2010
Posted in Social Media

Google has unveiled their latest social web product, Google buzz. Google buzz is a way for people to share status updates, photos, videos and much more. It works alongside your Google mail account (Gmail) and imports your contacts and connections from it. From first looks, it appears to be rather similar to services like Facebook and Twitter.

The question is, will Buzz give Google a prominent name in the field of social media? Before now, Google has been unable to launch a social media product that has actually taken off well. Will Google buzz be any different? Buzz does offer integration for many existing social networks; however, the functionality of this is rather obscure.

You need to think of it as; will Buzz be able to co-exist with Twitter and Facebook, or will it be crushed by them? If Google do not provide options for Buzz to integrate a reasonable amount of functionality from Facebook and Twitter, the outlook is a little bleak. So far, Google Buzz has no Facebook integration, and nobody is happy with it. Google seems to forget Facebook has a grand total of 400 million users and counting, if they want to sink rather than swim then they might as well carry on giving Facebook the ‘cold shoulder’.

There is some Twitter functionality, albeit not quite all that we would have asked for. Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Blogger and YouTube are all officially supported by Buzz. But with Twitter, it's only a one-way functionality. What I mean by this is that when you post a new tweet, it posts it to Buzz. But when you post a new status to Buzz, it doesn’t post it on Twitter. This is rather disappointing, especially when you consider Buzz’s non-existent integration approach to Facebook.

There is literally no connectivity for Facebook included in Buzz, there may be some backdoor program or way around it, but for those of us that don’t understand how to hack Buzz, it doesn’t sound very good. When asked this morning whether or not they would be implementing some functionality through Facebook connect, Google had nothing to say. If this doesn’t change soon, I hate to say it, but Buzz may be digging itself an early grave.

With Facebook on the midst of releasing a webmail client itself, it is set to become the giant of the social networking world. With the amount of dedicated users it has, when the webmail service is launched, it could easily become the biggest webmail client on the net. It would easily threaten the likes of Gmail, so Google needs to keep a good relationship between themselves and Facebook. If they don’t they could end up missing out on the social networking boom that is going on right now.

Unless Google comes up with something so different from anything Facebook has, or just anything they can’t compete with, Facebook is set to forever dominate the social realms of the internet. If Google doesn’t do something now, it stands no chance in the future.