/ 10 February 2010

Will you be using Google Buzz?

Whatever Google Buzz is, it’s certainly got people talking.

After the launch of the company’s new attempt to integrate social networking and email on Tuesday morning, some of the reaction has been good (people “may flock to Google Buzz,” said web pundit Louis Gray) and some of it is bad (“They put a virus into Gmail,” cried urblogger Dave Winer).

Despite the talk of a “revolution” at the launch, a lot of Google Buzz looks awfully familiar, from the Facebook-like sharing of information to the Twitter-like “@” replies. But most of all it is reminiscent of FriendFeed, the activity stream aggregator that was bought by Facebook last year for an estimated $50-million. No surprise, perhaps, given that FriendFeed’s founders had previously worked on Gmail and Google Maps.

Indeed, the similarities were so glaring that during one journalist asked during the launch event Q&A how Google had managed to acquire the rights to reproduce Friendfeed when it was Facebook that bought the service.

The eerily familiar feel to Buzz — delivered in that sparse-yet-sometimes-overwhelming style that is Google’s hallmark — means that the product’s certainly not as confusing on first glance as Google Wave. But it still has to make its mark.

At the event I shared a brief, interesting chat with Google VP Bradley Horowitz, who previously tried to champion social search at Yahoo! before (somewhat controversially) switching sides in 2008. Is Buzz part of Gmail or a separate product? It’s already got several standalone components, he said — it will be able to stand alone soon.

And, he stressed, it is part of a long-term plan the company has to expand into social areas and improve the way it brings you the information you’re looking for. Indeed, Sergey Brin seemed annoyed that the company’s previous forays into the social web have been deemed failures. Other companies would kill for the sort of penetration Orkut has in Brazil, he said (but clearly Google would kill for the sort of penetration that Facebook has, well, pretty much anywhere else).

Horowitz is right when he says it’s a long game — whatever happens with Google Buzz, this growing warfare over the social web is unlikely to go away any time soon.

Anyway, as I’m writing this, my email inbox still hasn’t been Buzz-enabled yet — so I’ve yet to give it a proper, real-world test run. Have you got it yet? And will you be using it? – guardian.co.uk