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.
