My thoughts on Google Buzz so far

With last week’s rollout of Google Buzz, Google has fired its first serious salvo at Facebook in the battle for the social networking crown… But is Google Buzz really all it’s cracked up to be?

So where does Google Buzz fit in the Social Media world?

From what I’ve seen, Google Buzz seems to fit in between blogging and Twitter. Mashable currently use it to ask 140+ characters questions to its readers, thus taking the conversation to another level, a real-time forum perhaps.

The main issue I have with Google Buzz at the mo, is content overload.

Will Google Buzz going kill Facebook?

Unlikely… Most of non-geeky friends are still on Hotmail and MSN Messenger (yuck, yuck), and are blissfully unaware of Google Buzz. Most of my Facebook friends are non-geeks, and I only share the occasional (non-social media) link on my Facebook profile. Google Buzz is therefore unlikely to impact on my, or my friends’ link sharing behaviour.

You’ll also notice that I added a ‘Share on Google Buzz’ plugin on this blog next to my TweetMeme plugin.* I do not have a Share on Facebook button installed on my blog. I made the assumption that my blog readers wouldn’t share my content on Facebook but Twitter or Google Buzz instead…

* Note to developers – would it be possible to add a re-buzz counter so that we can track how many people are re-buzzing our content? A TweetMeme type community would be awesome!

Privacy issues?

If people have not made their email addresses private on their Google profiles, then technically anyone can get in touch with them. I find this a little worrying to be entirely honest with you… Not all email users will know how to edit their Google profiles, and again I am pretty sure that a large chunk of Google Mail users are not even aware that they have a Google Profile!

Implications for brands and Digital PR?

Brands  should really worry about Google Buzz; in a crisis, negative comments could spread like wildfire. If Google were to add a ‘See the buzz’ feature on their search engine homepage, Internet users would be able to view real-time results about a product or brand; we all know by now how much we trust strangers! I’d really like to see Google introduce a search content by location/language feature; it shouldn’t be too difficult, should it?

What are you opinions of Google Buzz so far? Where does Google Buzz fit in your Social Media consumption?