Google – Buzz or Boredom?

From Bruce Townsend, Actinic

Google seem to have created a bit of a buzz lately with a product called… well, Buzz. But is it any good, and should marketers pay it any attention?

Google Buzz is essentially a feed reader, and a pretty basic one at that; in fact it seems to be derived from Google Reader, which has been around for a few years now.

With Buzz, though, Google have done some clever things. They’ve included support for media; given it a particular focus on social networking sites; and made it easy to add feeds from the main ones. They’ve also integrated it with Google Mail. So now you can check your emails and view posts from all the people you are following, all in one place – including picture feeds from Flickr and Picasa, and video from YouTube.

They’ve also branded and marketed it quite neatly. Coupled with its profile within Google Mail, this has grabbed a lot of attention and made it the talked-about application of the moment.

Being a feed reader, information does only flow in one direction. Comments posted only appear in Buzz, not in the application the original message came from. This may prove to be a weakness, and makes it vastly inferior to Flock, which has never gained much of a following. On the other hand, Buzz has the benefit of Google’s massive weight behind it.

To really gain traction, Buzz may have to actually wean people away from services like Twitter, and it may be too late in the day for that. Initially it will probably be used mainly for person to person interaction, particularly Google Mail users. But it could become a useful tool for businesses wanting to monitor what customers are saying. And with Google behind it, who knows how far it will go?

It’s certainly one to watch.