The launch earlier this week of Google Buzz has put the spotlight on the social media universe, and whether there’s an effective way to deal with the growing noise-to-signal ratio.
Among other things, Google Buzz may prompt some people to consider about their use of social media services, and whether there’s room in their “digital toolbox” for Google Buzz to sit along aside services such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning and MySpace.
One of the big challenges facing Google Buzz is convincing people to give it a whirl when they’ve already got tools that provide much of the same functionality. While Google Buzz has some nice features, it might not be enough to get people to switch. It’s like getting Coca-Cola drinkers to try a new product from Pepsi that may just be the best soft-drink ever created.
In some respects, Google is a late-comer to the social media party even though its portfolio includes Blogger (blogging) and Orkut (social networking). To date, Google’s social media track record has been, at best, mediocre. For example, it purchase Jaiku a couple of years ago to get into the micro-blogging market, but Jaiku has pretty much disappeared from the scene.
As a result, Google is attempting to play catch-up by leapfrogging the competition. Google Buzz isn’t really an attempt to take on Facebook or Twitter but a move to provide social media users with a completely different experience that integrates all of your social media activity into a single “portal” – aka GMail.
It’s an ambitious project given that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace have such large followings but using Google’s use of GMail as the platform to establish a beachhead makes a lot of sense.
For Google, the success of Google Buzz will depend on whether the features resonate with users who seem pretty content with what’s currently in their toolbox. If Google Buzz can offer a new and different social media experience, it might change the landscape in a major way.
Tags: facebook, google, google buzz, Social Media, twitter
The biggest problem with social media and the ‘noise to signal ratio’, as you put it, is segmentation. We’re still not able to break our our social media into easy-to-manage buckets so we can sort through information effectively, and there are few (VERY few) third-party tools that allow us to receive information through social media in a segmented way.
Google Buzz fails as badly, so it’s just more of the same.
Anyways, that’s my take on the future.