Google Buzz - A social network aggregator February 11th, 2010
On the 9th of February, just two days ago, Google launched a new social networking platform called Buzz. Built into the popular Gmail interface, it’s already attracted a lot of positive and negative feedback from vocal bloggers around the net.
Some people have labelled it as a Twitter killer, or complained about it’s uncanny ability to discover people’s various social networks and pull them together into a single feed. But this isn’t the colossal invasion of privacy that people are worried about. Instead, it’s simply an attempt to bring the multiple threads of publicly available content about individual people into a single online forum.
The current state of affairs on the internet is extremely fragmented, with individuals typically subscribing to multiple social networks all offering different channels of communication. To share pictures, they use Flickr or Picassa. To share status updates, they use Twitter or Facebook. As such, they often end up holding multiple conversations in parallel, using different clients, but with the same core group of people.
Buzz allows people to tie together all their social media channels into a single, personalised feed of information that can be easily shared with their friends. Whereas before I would use an RSS reader to subscribe to Bob’s blog and a Twitter client to receive his updates, now I can simply follow him in Buzz to find out what he’s be up to. Even better, I might get to see some of his photos from Flickr, which I previously never knew about.
More interesting still, Google have talked about a series of extensible APIs and protocols that will allow other vendors to create distributed Buzz clients with their own branding. In a similar way that you access the email network using a variety of email clients, so Google hopes to unify the various fragmented social networks into a functioning whole.
So there’s actually no reason to throw away all your beloved social networks and move into Buzz. All you need to do is activate the service, tell it about your other social networking sites, and carry on as before. It’s then up to other people to choose their preferred method of following you.
Personally, I’m feeling pretty blown away by the potential this service has to offer. If you feel the same, or think I’ve got entirely the wrong end of the stick, then no worries. By now this article will have been hoovered up by Buzz and you can add a comment of your own to the feed!
Find me here: http://www.google.com/profiles/david.etianen#buzz
~ Posted by David Hall
