According to the Associated Press, Google has tweaked their social hub, Buzz in response to privacy concerns.  Gmail users worried that Buzz made their email contacts visible to others.  It did so by turning these email contacts into followers (or in Facebook terms, “friends”), and making this list public.

Google rolled out Buzz earlier this week.  The Gmail service allows users to give status updates and share interests through their email account.  Sound familiar?  That’s because, according to Yahoo and Microsoft, they have been doing it for years.  “Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”  Yahoo makes a strong claim that they were the original.  In a recent tweet, Yahoo posted: “Two years after #Yahoo! launched #Buzz, Google follows suit. Check out the original: http://buzz.yahoo.com/”

You can’t argue with that.  In fact, it seems that Google didn’t even try to be creative by coming up with an original name.

Google has not enjoyed much success in the social networking arena.  Does anyone remember Orkut?  What about Google Wave?  You don’t hear much about them any more, do you?  Google Wave was supposed to kill email and was a trending topic on Twitter for weeks, maybe even months.

Since Google Buzz is fully integrated with Gmail, they have initially added 176 million users (according to com Score) to their new social network.  This is an amazing number for any new social site, even one with the name “Google”.  However, they haven’t had much social networking success in the past and they are already facing some serious concerns with this one.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it was laying of 5000 people from its workforce.  Sure we can blame the failing economy, but many people are contributing this major layoff on the Window’s Vista operating system. While it has not been yet reported if any of the layoffs are going to affect the Microsoft Advertising division, it has been reported that they are looking to expand this division post-layoff.

Microsoft AdCenter has come a long way in the past couple years. One of the last major search engines to step up its advertising platform, I have to admit they are doing a great job of trying to keep up with Google’s advertising technologies. AdCenter has already surpassed Yahoo’s Panama system, which is often far more complicated and tedious to manage (try making bulk changes on the fly!!!).

Recently added to MSN’s arsenal is the desktop software (currently in Beta) that rivals Google’s Adwords Editor.  Microsoft Advertising has also expanded it’s program to offer a more CPA-focused capabilities.  While the advertising programs keep improving one thing that MSN should concentrate on is expanding its user-base.

eVolving Interactive uses MSN to bring in supplementary traffic for its clients. We have found that the inventory has consistently stayed low. I believe that MSN could be a leader in Search Engine Marketing if they did a better job trying to attract everyday people into using it’s search engine.