Left: Inline with the Google style guide of primary colors, Google launches a new logo for Google Buzz, using familiar “chat bubble” iconology.
Google launches status update features
Google launches Buzz, which many will find similar to Friendfeed now part of the Facebook family. Google Buzz will enable content to be aggregated, and then prioritized based upon the people you already email with, which Harry McCracken and I call this a social graph based on history, “Historical social graph” or HSG. Secondly, this Google Buzz feature will rate and rank content based on activity and interaction within your social group. Users can choose to publish the Buzz in public, which will display on the Google Profile page. They also announced the ability to input this data from mobile devices and showed a voice to text scenario. They plan to make more announcements based on enterprise versions –and more at their IO developer conference.
Enough about news, I’m sure you’ll find more on Techmeme, here are my insights.
Analysis: Impacts To Industry
- Google continues its prime directive. At the high level, this is a strong move for Google, they continue to aggregate other people’s social content, and become the intermediatry. This helps them to suck in Twitter, Flickr, and any-other-data type as the APIs open up, giving them more to ‘organize’. This is Google acting on it’s mission to the world.
- Privacy woes will scare consumers –yet adoption will continues upward. For consumers, the risk of privacy will continue to be at top of mind. Although the features allow for sharing only with friends or in public. expect more consumer groups to express concern. Overtime, this will become moot as the next generation of consumers continues to share in public.
- Buzz could have faster adoption rate than Twitter. For consumers, this could potentially have more adoption than Twitter as Gmail has a large footprint Google told me it’s tens of millions (active monthly unique). Of course, most Gmail users likely aren’t Twitter users, but there could be a large platform to draw from.
- Physical businesses lose more control over search strategy. For small busineses and retailers, this will impact their search engine results pages, as a single top ‘buzzer’ could cause their content to be very relevant, if that person was relevant, then their influential content could show at top of SERP pages. Expect Google to continue to offer advertising options now around buzz content –fueling their revenues.
- A direct blow to Facebook, they must accelerate go to market. To Facebook, this is a direct threat, these features emulate Friendfeed and the recently designed Facebook newsfeed. Expect Google to incorporporate Facebook connect, commoditizing Facebook data as it gets sucked into Google and displayed on Google SERP.
- Great for Twitter now –yet painful in the long term. This is good for Twitter in the short term, as it’ll amplify tweets, and suck them into a new system and give additional reach. Yet over time, status features will become a commodity, and Twitter as a destination will fade into the background.
Back in July 2009, I took a bold statement to say that Email and Social Networks are the same, I distinctly recall a lot of people disagreeing with this notion, but I think it became true today. Posted from the Googleplex at the live briefing, I also spoke to NYT, SF Chronicle, SJ Mercury, NYT (second time), UPI, and Financial Times. Also, I polished some of the writing up in the afternoon, as the first pass was quick and dirty.
I might be the only one who thinks this, but in my opinion, Android is the secret sauce that makes all of this work. As Android phones get released and consumers slip them in their pockets, which social apps do you think will work most seamlessly with the phone and the rest of its native apps? My guess Gmail and Google Buzz. And as mobile devices overtake computers as the device of choice for internet use, this gives Google a massive competitive advantage I think.
Great analysis Jeremiah. I especially liked your point about how small businesses could use this to boost their search results by landing a top 'buzzer.' Interesting idea…
Thanks for this analysis, I've been trying to really pin down the “why” google did this, and I think this is it. I'm also excited about the possibilities for small business use, Buzz is going to prove to be a very powerful part of the social media world.
Great post Jeremiah–
My mind is filled with ideas of course, but the one that keeps yelling the loudest is how far Buzz will lower the social web's barrier to entry for everyone who isn't “tech-savvy”, let alone an early adopter.
Take my MIL for instance. She just joined Facebook and like many people, gives me the blank stare of death whenever I start “geeking out on her”. How nice it will be to tell her to just create a Google profile and click on the Buzz icon in her email nav? Once people see and feel the pulse of social media, they usually get it. Teaching them to tweet and what an RT is seems to be the hard part.
Great post Jeremiah–
My mind is filled with ideas of course, but the one that keeps yelling the loudest is how far Buzz will lower the social web's barrier to entry for everyone who isn't “tech-savvy”, let alone an early adopter.
Take my MIL for instance. She just joined Facebook and like many people, gives me the blank stare of death whenever I start “geeking out on her”. How nice it will be to tell her to just create a Google profile and click on the Buzz icon in her email nav? Once people see and feel the pulse of social media, they usually get it. Teaching them to tweet and what an RT is seems to be the hard part.
Google buzz improve features you can also add social features to any products you want. This is great for building social apps. Google Buzz is really amazing. Sikat ang Pinoy
You're absolutely right about Google making it's software available on every mobile device. What I was trying to get at was the incremental opportunity Google has over facebook, twitter and the like. All three can build apps for every mobile handset… but only Google (eventually) can integrate itself perfectly seamlessly with a mobile operating system that it owns and pre-package it with every mobile device that uses its operating system that gets sold. Its the same advantage that Microsoft Office enjoyed over Corel Office. Probably didn't make that point clear enough – and still not sure if I'm doing a good job, actually.
Speaking of Microsoft, if Microsoft had been able to make Windows Mobile work well enough to be a big player, they would have had a similar opportunity I think based on IM and hotmail
I'm not sure about this new technology. I'm certainly a layman, but when I login to gmail I'm just in the facebook [soc. media] zone.
Google/Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo should just team up so that they can just take the lead away from Facebook, or at least put up a fight.
A compelling aspect of buzz is how it leverages the rich context of Google maps. No other location-aware service does this. Buzz doesn't plot me as a lat/lng. It's a an address, or a business name, and the prompt to select a relevant location works well. This is really cool, and could also be a threat to Yelp.
However, from a non-Gmail user perspective, it's a mess. I'm a Google Apps user, and right now, there's a big disconnect between gBuzz and Google Apps, as Google Accounts and Google Apps logins do not play well together. In fact, the whole concept of a 'Google Account' is alien to most people (with the exception of straight up Gmail users who get an Account by default). Have you ever tried to get a person to associate their email address with a Google Account? Yikes. And the Google captcha is a nightmare.
Finally, the fact that Google forces you to have a public profile to post a Buzz is a bit oppressive. And your Google Profile has your real name displayed, you cannot display the nickname (that I've found) and still post a 'buzz'.
There's a reason people have handles on public services, like Yelp or Twitter, and keep their FB profiles private. Yes, I can create a private Buzz, but that forces me to make a choice. If you force a decision, the dropoff in completion is significant.
This is not to say gBuzz will fail. All I suggest is they will have a struggle to achieve mainstream adoption. It's still to techy, too geeky. And too many decisions are required. There is something very valuable in what they are trying to achieve, and it is all about improving search, and therefore it's in direct alignment with their mission (and primary revenue source)
Is “commoditizing” a word? That's a new one for me. However, thanks for the information.
I don't mean to be rude, but check your its/ it's 🙂 Apostrophe for it is, no apostrophe for ownership.
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i am agree with you that Google has fantastic tools for business owners who want to market their website in extraordinary ways. Google integrates Social Media quite well.
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