The worlds most powerful search engine has cornered the search market in most countries around the globe (bar one notable absentee). Now, it is entering into the world of social to try and fend off the threat of competitors like Facebook and Twitter on its search business. Google Buzz, was officially launched today and from an industry perspective, looks to be a decent move and a good product (I've yet to try it). With lots of Google users (myself included) already using Gmail, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa and other services, bringing them all into one place makes a lot of sense.
Millions of internet users have accounts on multiple platforms and to use them all individually can be a bit of a pain. If I want to share information with someone on Twitter from an email I've received, I have to copy and paste content, format it and send it. I might not even be bothered to it at all and therefore might not share data with people who might want to view it. Google Buzz aims to bring many accounts into one place to share information more seamlessly and more easily and with more people.
It is this sharing of data which is going to make or break Google Buzz and then potentially Google Wave (which has done nothing notable thus far). If users don't use the product and don't share information with others, then it's likely it wont take off. Google already has a lot of data about the users who use their products and has even started personalising results pages without people realising. If Buzz takes off, then everything from who we interact with and the data that we share will be known. Google is going to know a whole lot more about who we are, what we do and who we know.
If you decide to use Buzz on your mobile then it gets even more information about where you are and where you go. At the launch of Google Buzz, they had this to say about Buzz mobile;
"When you click on Buzz on the Google homepage, we find your location with your phone’s GPS – we take the lat/long and recommend a place we think you’re at. So how does this work indoors? The same technique but we use time or day, and things nearby you to guess where you are. It’s very smart."
Google needs to get into this 'social graph' of data as it's currently owned by companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. If it can start to own this graph, it can then start to monetize it in even more powerful ways than it does at the moment using Google Adwords. It already has the thousands of advertisers on it's books so can easily roll this out to them and increase shareholder value dramatically.
This might read as a somewhat sceptical post about the motives behind Buzz. While I am an hourly user of Google and most of its services (in fact you could argue that I wouldn't have a job if it wasn't for them!), I do have to wonder about how much one company should know about an individual. I also started to question their attitude to privacy and data after a recent talk at Southampton University about privacy which mentioned the use of LSO super cookies.
About Buzz, Google says;
"Our strong belief is that organizing the world’s social information is a huge problem. The kind that Google loves to solve."
which is an amiable statement. Indeed, getting to the bottom of social media and making all of the emails, tweets, posts and photos relevant and useful is a massive task and one which could only really be solved by a company of Googles size. If it can make our lives easier and more productive (which is one of Buzz's main objectives) then it can only be of benefit to its users.
However, there is no such thing as a free lunch. If Buzz does become a widely used tool then its users need to remember that Google will be collecting data even more data than it does already about what we do and using it to ultimately give us more highly targeted advertising. It's also been stated that "Google has never been known to delete data they've collected, since day one." despite it's now dropped message of 'Don't be evil' so could build up quite a picture of every user if it really wanted to.
So we need to make a choice between convenience or privacy. Time will tell who will win.
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