Launching a frontal assault on Facebook, Google on Tuesday plunged deeper into the realm of social networking, introducing a sort of e-mail on steroids that will allow Gmail users to interact through multiple media and dig into the rich smorgasbord of services already available from the world's king of search.
Dubbed Google Buzz, the new feature enables Gmail users to create status updates ala Facebook, pull in Twitter tweets from friends, and corral a whole slew of elements — YouTube videos, Picasa and Flickr photos, Web links — into a Googlized version of virtual social interaction.
Pitting Google's full and formidable search and mapping arsenal against both Facebook and Yahoo, which has had a
At its unveiling at company headquarters in Mountain View, Bradley Horowitz, vice president for product management, said Buzz was Google's latest effort to foster social networking by cleaning out the Internet's clutter, a mess caused in part by social networking sites in the first place.
"The stream of messages has become a torrent," he said. "There's real content in that stream. But there is no way to parse that amount of information, that ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime."
'Static e-mail' evolves
By embedding
Buzz directly into Gmail, Google engineers hope to streamline sharing and make it smarter, both online and through mobile devices. By clicking the Buzz icon, users will automatically "follow" friends they most often e-mail and chat with, tapping into anything they are posting, from Web links to vacation photos to real-time reviews on the taqueria where they just ate. The new feature lets you make your own Buzz posts public — and therefore searchable with Google — or private, accessible only to specified friends. And by harnessing its trademark algorithmic search and categorizing powers, Google will "score" the incoming updates into good and not-as-good Buzz. With Buzz on board, product manager Todd Jackson said, "it's no longer just a static e-mail but a live object in your inbox." Google software, he said, will collect feedback when users click on updates, and "we'll learn what you like. Organizing the world's social information has become a big problem — but it's the kind of problem Google loves to solve." Buzz, which will be available in coming days, is Google's direct response to Facebook's rapid rise since it started six years ago. With more than 400 million worldwide users, Facebook's large audience — whose posted information cannot be indexed by Google's search engine — threatens to siphon away some of the search giant's advertising sales. "This is a direct attack on Facebook," said veteran tech analyst Jeremiah Owyang with the Altimeter Group. Buzz "comes as no surprise because it's part of Google's mission to organize Web content for users, then become the intermediaries and put advertising around it. This is more of the same." Twitter's new rival Owyang said Buzz could be a threat to Twitter, "since Gmail is more mainstream, and users may adopt it faster than they've adopted Twitter." And he sees Buzz as possibly "disruptive to businesses." He used the example of mobile phone users disappointed in a yogurt shop, then having their real-time negative Buzz review show up in a Google search for that business. "And their Buzzes could show up higher in the search results than the business itself." Not surprisingly, Yahoo and Microsoft, two powerhouses coveting the social networking sphere, blasted Buzz within minutes of Tuesday's announcement at the Googleplex. Yahoo, whose approximately 303 million users dwarf Google's 176 million Gmail customers, sent out a release boasting, "It's been almost a year and a half since we first launched Yahoo Updates — a social feature that lets people share their status, content and online activities and stay connected to what their friends and family are doing on Yahoo! and across the Web." Uphill battle And Microsoft, practically gloating in a statement, said, "Busy people don't want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We've done that" with Hotmail, which has an estimated 369 million users. IDC analyst Karsten Weide, who studies the intersection of new media and the digital marketplace, said Google's new feature faces an uphill battle in breaking Facebook's domination of social networking or stunting Twitter's phenomenal growth spurt. "I'm not that optimistic about Google Buzz," he said. "It's similar to what Yahoo already does on Yahoo Mail — leveraging social connections that are already there in e-mail. But it's pretty much a flop because people who are likely to use it are already using Facebook and Twitter, so why use Yahoo?"
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