Google’s crept up up behind the tech and social media world and banged a blown-up paper bag with the launch of Google Buzz. Essentially it makes Gmail “social” by allowing users to do Facebook and Twittery things with people in their address books.
I access all my Google services from a non-Gmail account (I use Yahoo as my main webmail account), so I haven’t had time to try it out, but instinctively it doesn’t seem right to me. In today’s information overload world, I don’t think email’s a particularly good method of sharing information – particularly for work, but at times home use – so I’m not sure Google Buzz will stick.
That said, the main thing that might change my mind on this is the mobile integration. By geo-tagging status updates and other activity and integrating it with Google Maps, it opens up a whole new world of social networking, that’s relevant by location. I’ve thought for a while that the “next big thing” in social media would be location based social media services. After the relative lukewarm response to Google Latitude, this could be it. According to Mashable, Google’s also made the sensible decision of making it work on the iPhone as well as the Google Android platform.
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I find this kind of conversation usually gets me pondering about how the networks actually interact between each other. I reckon it harks back to when the net was initially being looked at by the Internet Godfather and their end goals at CERN.