By: Steve RetkaFacebook had barely blown out the candles from its 6th birthday before it received an unwanted gift: a new social networking competitor from an Internet giant.
On February 9th, Google threw its hat into the social media ring with the launch of Google Buzz. It’s designed to work with Google’s e-mail service Gmail, and allows Gmail users the ability to share thoughts and multimedia, update their status, follow others, even link in feeds from other social media sites.
But the biggest news isn’t that Google is trying to contend with current social media titans like Facebook and Twitter...but that it’s succeeding.
That’s because in its first 56 hours alone, Google Buzz had amassed over 9 million posts and comments. That works out to about 160,000 posts and comments per hour.
With Facebook and Twitter in obvious panic mode over these staggering numbers, let’s take a quick look at why Google may have a huge hit on its hands.
First and foremost, Google Buzz is linked directly to Google’s existing Gmail service. The genius of this move is that not only does this make it easier for new users to join, but taps into enormous audience that already uses Gmail, which currently exceeds 38 million unique users. Combine that with the resolved privacy issues, and it’s not all that surprising that Google Buzz has enjoyed the early success that it’s had.
So will Google Buzz extend Google’s online empire into the ever-changing landscape of social media? It may be too early to tell yet, but most signs point towards Google continuing to create quite a buzz with its latest Internet innovation.