Earlier this month, Google announced their foray into the world of social networking sites by launching their own site, Buzz. As covered by the BBC's website, Buzz enables users to share content and review each others' updates via integration with Google's Gmail product. Since the Gmail user population currently stands at around 170 million, Google will be aiming to capture this market to compete with the Facebook community (at a mere 400 million users worldwide). Whether Google's Buzz will make an impact on the Facebook and Twitter markets remains to be seen; the BBC article also points out that Yahoo users can already view Flickr and Twitter updates via their mail accounts, hence Google has some ground to make up.
Private updates can be added to the user's profile but will not fall onto search engine radars; public updates will be indexed. Content deemed relevant to a user's profile will also be made available.
Other benefits include giving users access to their web content via Android (Google's mobile platform); they will benefit from seeing updates posted on their phone, together with the location of the sender, whilst public updates such as rating a restaurant will be uploaded to Google Places.
Understandably Google is upbeat about Buzz - as the Official Google Blog page says: “We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don't have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you're sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time”.
Buzz did come in for fierce criticism though - and on the back of the launch, Google has had to make changes to the information displayed on the user profile (previously, Google automatically allocated followers to a profile based on how often the user had contacted the follower on Gmail). Google claim they have now listened to the issues and have made changes to Buzz so the user has to manually select associates to become followers.
Following on from the Buzz launch, Yahoo announced a partnership with Twitter to enable Yahoo users to view and update their twitter feeds on Yahoo's home page, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Sports. Yahoo is looking to widen the appeal of their online products/news sections and users will be able to access tweets without logging out of Yahoo. In an article posted on the New York Times website, Yahoo will also include real-time content on its sites - in the same way Google and Bing have done.
Yahoo's senior director of product management, Cody Simms was quoted as saying: “We are letting our users bring what they love about their social networks to Yahoo.”
This announcement comes several months after Yahoo tied up with Facebook along similar lines. With Twitter reporting they are now handling over 50 million tweets per day, the competition between the big search engines and the leading social networks is stepping up a gear and the share of online advertising spend is no longer the monopoly of Google, Yahoo and Bing as social networks become a major player as an advertising channel.
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