I have to agree with Pete Cashmore, the founder and CEO of Mashable when he wrote in his column on CNN.com that Google Buzz does play a significant role that is unique from Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook, try sharing even a photo with anyone that isn’t part of Facebook and they are shut out unless they register. So getting noticed outside your circle of friends isn’t a part of their plan. It is more for private versus public conversations.
With Twitter and the re-tweet feature, suddenly conversations became extremely viral as long as it had value that interested people. And though all kinds of conversations happen on Twitter, they can come and go in your home feed, columns or any tool that you use to follow what’s going on on Twitter.
Here’s where Google Buzz is different. When you follow people and they follow you, the status updates become conversations where every new comment is fed back into your Gmail inbox (which can be forwarded to any email address you want by the way). That means that you will never miss out on the emergent conversation, which can sometimes be more interesting that the original post.
Cashmore has started calling Buzz the campus online. A place for “suggestions, tips and ideas. It’s a place for inquiry, for learning and collaboration.” Where he refers to Facebook as the local bar, populated with just your friends, and Twitter as the Town Square. Google Buzz seems like it has the real opportunity to add something important that the other two don’t. Ongoing, easy to follow conversations among people who you feel are important to collaborate with and all their friends too. Just as people read blogs to stay up on specific industries or subjects, Google Buzz has the opportunity to allow us all to start and participate in specific conversations, and have the threads (ongoing comments) keep us up to speed by automatically coming to us.
I have started following interesting social media industry people, and the conversations are great. This is a fantastic way to stay informed, get known and keep ahead of the learning curve. Not to mention provide more and more ideas for your social networking and value that you extend to prospects in your industry.
Buzz has only been out for such a short while (February 9th), but it seems that there is a niche that it is filling separate from the big players like Facebook and Twitter. And the initial stats are a real indicator. Google released numbers from it’s first 56 hours alone that are staggering. There was over 9 million posts and comments, amounting to around 160,000 posts and comments per hour.
Stay tuned for more buzz on Goolge’s Buzz!
