Google aims for a Buzz against Facebook
Updated on 09 February 2010
Google unveils a new product - Google Buzz - in an effort to combat the huge growth and popularity of social network Facebook and social media system Twitter.
Google is without question the most powerful company on the web, its search engine is used by more than 90 per cent of British web users.
But Google is threatened by the growth in these rival networks.
Recent statistics from Hitwise indicate that the proportion of traffic to news websites from these social networks is growing dramatically, more than doubling over the past year.
Google News contributes 1.4 per cent of clicks to newspaper websites, while Facebook contributes 3.52 per cent.
The main Google search engine contributes 17.32 per cent of clicks. Google hopes Buzz can counter the growth in Facebook.
It allows users to quickly share messages, Web links and photos with friends directly within Gmail, the company’s email product.
"Buzz is like an entirely new world inside of Gmail," Todd Jackson, Google Buzz said tonight. "If I want to post images publicly I can share them to the world.
"Anything I post publicly will go to my followers and my Google profile. Instantly indexed by Google's real time search.
"But I can also share privately. It's easy to post to groups and also easy to create custom groups. We paid attention to these little details as we heard from users this was too hard to do on other websites."
Note the term "followers", sound similar to Twitter? You bet.
Google will also launch a mobile version for Buzz as well as integrating it into the main search engine and maps service.
But Google has been here before. Heard of Orkut? Well it is Google’s answer to Facebook launched in 2005. It is huge in Brazil, but not in the USA or UK.
Google is dominant on the internet, so this is significant but they are playing catch-up with Facebook and Twitter.
It needs to conquer the social market now, before it becomes even more mainstream and even more integrated into the structure of the web.
But Orkut has failed to attract as many users as social giants like Facebook and MySpace in the United States.
In building a social network on top of an email product, Google is following in the footsteps of Yahoo, which has taken a similar approach in efforts to keep up with Facebook.
