Love a good SWOT analysis and just came across one that Jeremiah Owyang published last month that looks at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats of these four social networks: Google Buzz, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
I find it most interesting that he would even include MySpace in the equation seeing as how they just don’t seem to offer much these days… and definitely seem to be becoming more irrelevant by the day.
With a month’s perspective behind us, I also find it interesting how he puts Google Buzz at the same level as Facebook and Twitter. It seems to me that Google Buzz is quickly going the way of Google Wave… Interesting technology that will definitely be used heavily in a few niches, but it’s not likely to change the way the majority of people interact online.
Gary Adler, 
Waco Moore 6:48 pm on February 14, 2010 Permalink |
Hi Dustin, I’m feeling kind of the same way as you. I am not a Gmail user, so I had no existing network to leverage (or expose!). A few things struck me about Buzz initially: the integration with Reader was interesting from a content sharing perspective, but it changes the whole sharing model for Reader, at least for me. I had previously had Reader set to share with only two people on a very private basis. Managing the sharing permissions between Buzz and Reader was clumsy to say the least and it took some time to get the settings right. I would change permissions in Reader but Buzz would not recognize the changes.
The other thing that really struck me was the mobile version of Buzz. To me it seemed to make Buzz as much of a play against Yelp! and Foursquare as it is against FB. Obviously Google wants a good slice of that mobile location-aware ad revenue. The location awareness of the mobile app is pretty nice and I like the notion of the Buzz overlay in Google maps (at least as an idea). I use Google maps on my iPhone and if I could easily drill-down within Maps to Yelp and Foursquare quality user-generated content that could be a bonus…
The thing that really blew my mind was that updates from the mobile app use your exact street address if there is not an existing Place nearby. CREEPY! When I first loaded the app, allowed it to use my location, and clicked “Nearby” I saw a bunch of folks posting updates from the houses around me, including some young looking teenagers. I really doubt they realized that they were publishing their home addresses. There wasn’t much talk about this in the initial “buzz” about privacy issues, but it is something that Google needs to address if they haven’t already.
The general challenge for me with email and social media is my ability to manage it from a time and attention standpoint. There are just too many channels. Perhaps if I was on Gmail and Buzz was functioning as more of an aggregator there might be more appeal, but right now I’m not feeling it. Not to mention the fact that FB, the 800lb gorilla, is still unaddressed. A simple substitute will not get folks to switch from FB. there is going to have to be a really compelling, easy to communicate benefit, and I don’t think Buzz has delivered that.