Google has started to roll out its own Social Media platform to take on Twitter and Facebook. Check in your Gmail account over the next few days to see if you have access! It’s also planned to make Google Buzz available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features for sharing within organisations.
At the moment I’ve not had a chance to have a play with it yet, but it looks to be offering an easy way to share content online with an improved mobile experience.
Buzz will show a thumbnail of YouTube video’s and make it easy to play in line.
With photos, it will show thumbnails, with a custom photo viewer, which lets you flip through pictures and see them “big and fast”. You can “like” and “unlike” stuff, and expand comments.
Public/Private sharing – The post box will let you post updates publicly or privately. If it’s public, it will go to your Google profile, and is indexed by Google’s real-time search.
In your in-box, you’ll see notifications that contain real-time comments. It will sit in the same in-box as your regular email, but you can move between your regular in-box and your Buzz stuff.
Mobile could be one of the biggest keys to the success of this product. Google says Google.com is the world’s most popular mobile home page, and Buzz can be accessed from there on iPhone and Android devices.
Buzz could also benefit businesses as an organisational tool. The first thing that comes to mind is the expansion of communication with existing contacts. When you’re frequently seeing what your Gmail contacts are saying, it will not only keep those people fresh in your mind, but it could develop further communication.
The question is, will Gmail users buy into this quick sharing? Google thinks so because it’s a part of the evolution from email, to IM, to status updates. In Google’s eyes, this is part of the evolution to the next big jump to Google Wave. Buzz could be the little step needed to get people to think about communicating in a way beyond email and IM.
