Not content with its monster share of the search engine market, Google got greedy today and unveiled Google Buzz, a revolutionary new social media product that adds a couple of Facebook type things to your Gmail account. Now you won’t have to interact with the hundreds of millions of people on Facebook and Twitter. Gmail will let you share status updates, photos and videos with your entire list of Gmail contacts.
Here are the five main features of Buzz that Google outlined in a press conference today at the company’s Mountain View headquarters.
- Automatic friends lists (friends are added automatically who you have emailed on Gmail)
- “Rich fast sharing” combines sources like Picasa and Twitter into a single feed, and it includes full-sized photo browsing
- Public and private sharing (swap between family and friends)
- Inbox integration (instead of emailing you with updates, like Facebook might, Buzz features emails that update dynamically with all Buzz thread content)
- “Recommended Buzz” puts friend-of-friend content into your stream, even if you’re not acquainted. Recommendations learn over time with your feedback.
With mobile integration and an aggregation feature that lets you pull content from Flickr, Picasa, YouTube and Twitter, Google is hoping to make this social media product something that wastes even more of your time every day.
Microsoft thinks it’s weak. Here’s what they said in a statement released today:
“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”
Yahoo also thinks it’s wack. In an email titled “Latest on Yahoo!’s social updates,” Yahoo! made sure to remind people about Yahoo! Buzz, a social-type product that’s been available since November 2008:
“There are now more than 200 Yahoo! and third-party sites that feed into Yahoo! Updates – like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp and Yahoo! Buzz – allowing people to see and share updates such as when they’ve uploaded photos, changed their status, buzzed up a news story or posted a new restaurant review, all from Yahoo!”
It remains to be seen whether people will care about this Buzz thing. It may seem a bit too late in the game for Google to make an impact in the social media space, but if anyone’s capable of making a dent, it’s Google.
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