Did you hear The Buzz?
Yesterday saw the launch of Google Buzz, a new tool billed by Google and others as the answer to the social side of the web, a way to finally manage and filter the continuous stream of social, real time information that flows around our various sites and systems we use these days. It has also been referred to as the interim step between the traditional email and IM approach of communicating, and Google Wave, the next-gen collaboration platform that Google is currently developing.
In simple terms, Buzz automatically pulls together information from various contacts across the web. It can pull information from Picasa, Flickr, Twitter, and a few other sources, and filters it automatically based on your browsing, RSS and other activities. It also uses this information to automatically build up your social network of friends, as defined by your activity on Google and these external sites. This all sounds great, a social network without the hassle of building up a social network. It all just happens automatically. And with it's direct integration into GMail, it's very convenient for everyone who uses GMail on a daily basis.
The interesting question will be how people react to Google's use of this data. It's been widely accepted that Google collects vast reams of data on each of it's users. Now it's making a serious push to begin using this data in a very direct way. That may make some people uncomfortable. And it's clear to see why. Without any help or input from myself, it's already built up quite a large list of "followers" for my own account. From a technical perspective, it's very impressive to see just how accurately it connected me with friends and family on Google. On a privacy side, if gives Google a lot of personal information about me that it can use for whatever it chooses. Personally, this is fine, and I trust Google not to abuse this power. But it's easy to see why others may be less comfortable with this arrangement.
If you look at the whole spread of information Google is now actively utilising across it's services, it knows where I live and where I go (Google Latitude), it knows my friends and family (GMail and Buzz), it knows my shopping activity (Google Checkout), it knows my interests (Google Reader, Web Search), it even knows the sorts of things I work on daily (GDocs). That's an incredible amount of information for one company to hold on an individual. How the general public react as Google continues to make increased use of all this data will be one to watch.
Paul
