Google Buzz, announced today, aims to bring together a slew of Google services and a stew of social networking ideas.
The challenge for Google is to make its Swiss-army-knife complexity appealing to a public that might prefer the separate simplicity of 140-character tweets and the close social connections enabled by Facebook.
Buzz will be a major work in progress for Google internally as it integrates related services and/or phases them out – Google Voice, the Google Wave collaboration service and Latitude location immediately come to mind.
The company says it is trying to reduce the “noise” in social networking and make status updates, tweets and media streams easier to sort through. But at the same time, it is offering a richer, more connected and complex real-time experience by adding in location data, nearby buzzes and related information.
Buzz is being integrated into Gmail in a similar fashion to Yahoo’s update of its mail service. Its design is similar to that of Friendfeed, the lifestreaming service imitated and then bought by Facebook.
Users can create multimedia status updates and their followers can add “like” tags and comments to them. Posts may be public or limited to a few friends. Social feeds from Flickr to Twitter and personal blogs can be automatically pulled in.
Location and maps can be added and buzzes and recommendations in the local area seen – putting Google in competition with services like Foursquare.
Buzz will be rolled out to Gmail users in the next few days and followers will be instantly created from their existing contacts. If everyone clicks to join, Buzz will become the largest social network after Facebook in short order.
Whether non-Gmail users will be tempted to sign up and use it depends on how much “buzz” it creates beyond Google from its users.
More than 400m people have already chosen Facebook to have their conversations. This is Google’s best attempt by far to tackle social networking, but it is arriving a little late in the day.
