Enter Google:
Google, being a huge cash cow, could have taken many routes toward social networking. But they could never create any traction with orkut.com outside of Brazil and India.
Instead Google seems to be following a strategy that has served them before. It basically works like this:
- Take information and content that is already exists somewhere.
- Collect and store it in a massive scalable database.
- Analyze the links and relationships inside that content.
- Based on that analysis – reformat it into something more useful for your users.
From this you get Google Search, Google Maps, Google Books, Google News, Google Reader etc. The list goes on. Google doesn’t generate ANY content. They basically just copy whatever data they can (which they usually don’t even need to pay for) and repackage it ways people want it.
And Google has the many of the smartest design engineers on the planet. But when people join social networks, they don’t really care how well it works – what they want is content. Both MySpace and Twitter have proven that users will tolerate all sorts of weak design, poor performance, and instabilities – as long as it has the content they want! When that content fades, users start to drift elsewhere (how long since you visited your MySpace account?). The very stickiness of Facebook and LinkedIn relies on them being where you must to go to get your Friend’s content.
When looking at a social network strategy, Google realized that that they already were managing lots of social information like blogger.com, YouTube, even Google Reader shares. All you really needed to do was to repackaged that data into single social network. Plus external sites like Twitter and Flickr both offered simple open APIs, so integrating those feeds into Buzz was a breeze. Add Google’s existing ability to collect and repackage all of this data and you get “instant” content.
Roll Buzz into Gmail and you instantly get Millions of users.
Google understands that a person’s real social network is the entire internet itself. No Facebook or LinkedIn or Myspace can ever wrap it all up and store inside their walled gardens. Part of Twitter’s success was not even trying to do so – They just have anybody the ability to broadcast their addition to internet to everybody else.
If you ask users today, they will say things like – “My family on Facebook, my collegues on LinkIn, Twitter to for drunken commentary the boys”. What users are doing (lacking any better way to do it) is associating each site with a specific set of people and interactions. So each sites is merely just one more media stream, one more other type of interaction, and users make poor attempts to control who sees what. But that get’s difficult when everything you do is now searchable, and it only takes a your potential employer a few clicks to find your drunken Tweets.
Google decided to tackle the problem of how can all these different streams of media – YouTube videos, tweets, photos, Zynga games, and more be repackaged and organized. Let people simply “communicate” from one person to another, but in a way that can unify all these services together.
People don’t want to have to deal with lists of “accounts” for all their friends – Do I email them? send them a Facebook msg? A Tweet? What the heck is their account name on all those sites anyways? It should be simpler to just manage friends, no matter where on the internet they prefer to hangout.
Buzz defines a User not an account.
Upon arriving at Google Buzz for the first time, Google already attempts to aggregate all of a users services. Google provided services are already there now: YouTube accounts, Google Reader accounts, Blogger.com blogs, all pre-discovered and ready to include. Users can also add connections to Flickr and Twitter accounts, but Google hints at the ability to control ANY account from any website. Now all the data you are already creating, can be aggregated into a single Buzz feed for your friends.
The magic is understanding while places like Facebook can represent “communities”, it takes an entire Internet create what people want and demand. No single site (Buzz included) can attempt to put any sort of wall around it. But if you could wrap tools around those social sites, in the same way Google has wrapped tools around Searching and Mapping and Emailing, then you have a compelling argument for changing the game plan.
As you add more and more sources of Media, Your “Google Profile” becomes the unified place for you to describe all your internet hangouts, and give people a way to access all of it in a single unified stream. As Buzz develops, it should actually simplify people’s ability to manage both their “public” internet image, and their private ones.
Buzz is also a new media stream.
Buzz users can mix media from their existing networks, or just add posts directly to Buzz itself.
Messages can be public or private. They can be created, edited (how many times have you wanted to edit that mis-spelled tweet!) and even completely deleted. Users can leave comments on any item. You can add external links and Buzz will make an immediate attempt to retrieve and ”embed” as much as the linked data as it can, so your readers either fully consume the item inside the Buzz stream, or at least see a preview of what the link points to. (Could this be the end of hyperlink pranks? Naw).
Somewhere between Twitter and Facebook
Facebook allows you to groups of closed and semi-closed communities. Twitter communities are lose and ever changing.
Buzz is attempting to simultaneously support both models – a tricky strategy, but critical to their long term goals. Buzz posts can either be private (like a email or direct message), semi-private (a Facebook wall-post), or public (like a tweet). It’s clearly an attempt to support “all” modes that people are communicating in at the same time.
Buzz uses the same “Follow” methodology of Twitter. This makes sense, since if users are already posting things to the entire internet, no “permission” is needed.
Google eventually wants to be able to manage all of your social relationships – from your closest relatives, to your co-workers, to your obsessional cyber-stalking of Stephen Colbert.
It’s not about broadcasting updates – It’s about managing conversations.
Most current early adopters of Buzz seem to be opting to using it for more Twitter-like public communication to the world, but this is probably also due to the fact that the network is so young, there isn’t enough critical mass of users to create semi-private groups like you see on Facebook. So I’m sure Google didn’t feel a need to improve “group” management yet.
But it doesn’t seem that Buzz wants to be another Twitter. Savvy Twitter users have to massage their tiny bits of brilliance into well-scripted 140 bytes, then broadcast it and hope they get a few retweets or @replies. But unless they are a well known Internet maven, most tweets ends up decaying into people’s daily Twitter noise.
Trying to “trace” a Twitter conversation is complicated. Use a twitter #hashtags to can help, but I get tired of the level of “re-tweets” that end up in the #hashtag stream. On Facebook, wall-to-wall conversation used to popular, until they allowed people to make comments on Status.
In Buzz, each post can become an ongoing conversation, even if the post was aggregated from another site like Twitter or Flikr.
Users aren’t required to managing a random flow of “micro-posts” coming at them from all directions. A post can grow to a thread, and a thread can grow into a social group.
Why is this really that Different from any other Forum, Blog, Group, #hashtag, etc.
If you look at Buzz today, it really just looks like yet-another place you need to go to manage your interactions. If Google’s answer to social networking was what you see in Buzz today, than it will clearly fall short of what is needed to get real traction.
But the trick is to see where Google is headed. And for that we need to take a peek under the covers…
NEXT POST: Walking through the Google Buzz API’s and and see how Google wants to become the center of all social networking on the internet.
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