Buzz

Google has been a busy bee. . . .

Google Buzz has just been launched and is fast becoming the hot topic on a lot of the social media networks. Having become acquainted with it myself this week; I have to say it is quite addictive.

It was designed as a social networking tool that would be integrated with all the other Google services – email, chat, reader, picasa and well as the main blogging and photo sharing sites.

Using Google Buzz through your Gmail is easy and efficient – just remember to adjust your privacy settings. Google have made the default security settings as private – this basically means all your Gmail contacts can see all your contacts and if you’re using an iPhone it will also show your current location using Google Maps. There is logic behind this though - Google did this - to "bootstrap" the network by generating links automatically, rather than requiring people to manually add links. The reason is that they wanted to quickly build a large social network to compete with sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc

If you look at the current stats for social network use you’ll see why Google wants to increase their Google Buzz network as quickly and efficiently as possible – LinkedIn just reached 60 million users, Facebook has 200 million and Twitter predicts 18 million by the end of this year. Twitter in particular is struggling with the huge increase in numbers, which you’ll know if you’re a user with their message “Twitter is over capacity. Too many tweets. We'll try to lighten the load and have things back to normal soon.”

Some people have raised privacy concerns about Google Buzz over the default privacy settings, where 'friend' links are automatically created from your Gmail and Reader contact lists - and these links are then exposed to the public. Fortunately some good advice is available online to quickly remedy this problem, both from Google itself and from some industry experts. Some don’t necessarily see the privacy settings as all that bad and have made some good arguments as to why this is the case; I think it’s good to read both sides of the argument.

From my own point of view, I’m enjoying using it - although it’s still only a week old I have to say so far so good. It's easy to use, has a good interface, and having it closely linked with Gmail means I tend to use it more often as a result! I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on Google Buzz?