So Google have quite firmly stepped on the toes of Facebook and Twitter and maybe even Foursquare with their recent addition to Google Mail – Buzz.
Now I’m not exactly an early adopter when it comes to social tools. I have a Twitter account that I seldom use. Although the concept of Twitter interests me the lack of desire unfortunately leaves me with a sparse account page with no followers or followees.
Again my interest was aroused in a similar way yesterday when I awoke to find that the new Buzz feature had been added automatically to my Google Mail account. After poking around for a few minutes I soon discovered what it was all about. Admittedly if there was a big banner in the UI that said “Buzz is Twitter but with videos and images in line as well as integration with your inbox” the penny would have dropped sooner. I think because of the striking similarities to Twitter it actually took me longer to work out what Buzz was. I was looking around for something that wasn’t to there to be found ie. something so different it wasn’t just twitter with caveats. Note – I still haven’t got my head around the public facing profile side of Google Mail, how it ties into your Google Account etc.
So what I was looking at was a Twitter clone with bells and whistles. That’s not to say that Buzz doesn’t offer an improved service to Twitter. The promise of the precise locating and review tools Ala Foursquare are certainly exciting as are many other improvements over Twitter. I love the fact that you can follow a conversation between two users on the same page. Incidentally the improved functionality of comments in comparison to Twitter brings me to one of the little annoyances of Google Buzz. It’s messy! Surely Google could have spent a little bit of time and added a little bit of shine to the public facing profiles. I mean look at the way the comments are formatted, how much time would have really taken to have just place a dividing line between one comment and the next or alternating row colours.
I saw a great tweet on the subject, it went something like “Google Buzz just looks like a messy version of Twitter”. Is this going to be the general consensus among Twitter users? If so Google need to fix it because lets face it Buzz’s early success will depend on Twitter users jumping ship. Will Twitter users actually use two micro-blogging social networks? I can’t see it.
This brings me to the reason why I’m personally going to hang-fire on Google Buzz for the time being. People have spent time building up relationships and followings on Twitter and with no import feature and no way of carrying that over to Google Mail I don’t think many people will be interested in making a switch just yet. Nor (as I stated earlier) do I think people are going to use two services as similar as Buzz and Twitter at the same time.
It is going to be interesting to see how this one shapes up over the coming months. I think we’ll get a similar divide between the two as we did with Facebook and Myspace but who’ll come out on top is much less obvious this time around as both offer such quality services. If Google can convince the everyday email user that Buzz isn’t a waste of their time then Buzz could become the every-man’s Twitter and Twitter may become a niche community, Twitter a nice community?! Well stranger things have happened.
