On Wednesday, Google announced their new social media product “Google Buzz”
According to the guardian, Buzz has been rolled out to all of Gmail’s 150 million users worldwide, though not yet to those using Gmail inside organisations, where it is expected to arrive next month.
When it was being tested internally, it was called Taco Town, and proved popular for sharing high-definition videos, said Hugo Barra, a product manager. “Google is really good at sorting information,” he said. “That’s what we intend to do with social information as well.” Some critics say this is Google’s attempt at twitter and it is not really offering anything new and exciting. However, if Buzz were to be used by all Gmail users, then it would have more users than MySpace. Facebook is currently the number 1 social networking site with 400 million users.
But what about mobiles? Well it does not work on all mobile phones yet, just the iPhone and the Google Nexus. I am sure Google is working on making sure Buzz is available on more handsets.
So how will Google compete in an already saturated market place? Apparently, Google already tried to build social networking systems before. In 2004, it launched a Facebook like site called Orkut and successful in Brazil. Google bought Jaiku in 2007, a Twitter-like system but was abandoned by the company in January 2009.
According to techradar , Yahoo and Microsoft already offered similar services. Yahoo launched http://buzz.yahoo.com/ two years ago. And Microsoft say their Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.
It seems like Google have copied the name from Yahoo and the idea from facebook and twitter without offering anything new. It will be interesting to see if Google can make Buzz work.