Social networking continues to amaze me, with Facebook the obvious example.
People on Facebook now share 5 billion pieces of content every week, five times as much as in July. Facebook users post 60 million status updates every day and, it was recently announced, now number more than 400 million. In the United Kingdom, a Facebook group called Secret London went from nowhere to 182,000 members in a mere two weeks, propelling its creator into the launch of a startup company that will continue what the group already does, disseminating information about unusual places to go and things to see in the city.
Even while Facebook tries to figure out how best to monetize this huge user community, Google now weighs in with its own entry in social networking, called Google Buzz. It's an attempt to add social features to Google's popular Gmail program so that the Buzz icon appears below your inbox and opens up to short updates from people you know, or at least people you have contacted.
Google mines your e-mail history to come up with people it thinks you want to connect to, which in my case turned up several individuals whose names I didn't even recognize. Better work on those algorithms, Google. (Google revised its methods after user complaints).
Trying out Buzz is easy. It just appears in your Gmail page and, if successful, Google obviously hopes it will draw new users into the popular Web-based e-mail program. What users get when Buzz appears are status updates, pictures, links and whatever their "friends" want to send them. You can also opt to bring items from Google Reader into your Buzz "stream," as well as Twitter updates or photos from Flickr or Picasa. In true social networking fashion, Buzz will also recommend items it thinks you might like based on all this.
Friends in one place
By aggregating several major social networking sites, Google Buzz lets you check on your friends' activities in one place, without having to skip from site to site (although Facebook is conspicuously absent). Will we allow another news feed into our lives? Maybe so, if it consolidates our streams of updates into a single, easy to use venue. Growth will likely be slow and, as with Gmail itself, Google Buzz may lag other products as the bugs are shaken out, but with Gmail's base of 176 million users per month, Buzz is automatically placed within easy reach of a large audience.
Facebook had better keep a close eye on Buzz. Google wins both ways: The Gmail user base is suddenly able to tap into connections it already has on many social media sites, and if Buzz begins to get traction it will draw more users into the Gmail orbit. Moreover, because of its integration with Gmail, Buzz trumps Facebook's unintuitive and constantly changing interface, which as I write has gone through yet another transformation.
For its part, Facebook just announced it has concluded a partnership with AOL that will integrate your Facebook "friends" into the AOL Instant Messenger product. Seventy percent of AOL users already use Facebook, and now e-mail chat directly between the two services becomes possible.
In the pipeline is a full-featured e-mail product that will replace or supplement the anemic Facebook messaging system. It's said to include full POP/IMAP support, which translates into letting users get their mail without going through Facebook itself. But fold a complete e-mail package into Facebook, and you've gone a long way toward keeping many Facebook users in the system for the bulk of their communications needs.
Google's recent acquisition of Aardvark brings an interesting social search engine into the mix - a way of finding information by querying people within a social network. Aardvark clearly complements what Google is trying to do with Buzz as the company tries to get a handle on user-generated content.
Will Buzz re-energize the company and bring it into contention with Facebook? The betting here is yes. Social networking is on an adrenaline high right now, and Google has the resources to make this attempt take off.
