Google Declares War On Facebook With Google Buzz

While it was expected that Google would use Gmail accounts as the center of users’ social graphs, the new Google Buzz makes it pretty obvious. Will Google eliminate Twitter or Facebook with this new service? Definitely not, however if you exchange emails with the majority of your contacts, Gmail could become a more efficient conversation aggregator. The one problem with Google Buzz will be the issue of combining email overload with social content overload.Google Buzz already integrates with Google Latitude to immediately integrate location aware features. Also included with Google Buzz is a mobile version which looks almost identical to Facebook’s existing mobile application. This makes it clear that Google’s new service is not an attack on Twitter but instead a powerful attack on Facebook.
Google Takes On Facebook
With email as your inbox (rather than Facebook’s existing messaging system and future mail product), Google already has one advantage over Facebook. Additionally, Google calendar serves as a tool for tracking all of your events, rather than having to integrate with Facebook’s existing events product. I have to admit that the new Buzz product is pretty enticing.
While I’m not leaving Facebook anytime soon, the fact that Gmail already has a large number of my contacts means that there is little barrier to getting started: I already have the majority of my contacts listed. While not all my contacts use Gmail, a large number of them are already using the service. Given that Google’s additional applications (Gmail, Calendar, etc) are already more powerful than Facebook’s, this is a shot across the bow of Facebook.
While I don’t see Facebook traffic declining anytime soon, Facebook will be forced to rapidly improve their product offering if they are going to compete with Google’s powerful new Buzz product. The fact that there’s also location aware features directly in Google Buzz means that Google just one-upped Facebook, who has yet to integrate location features