What’s the Deal with Google Buzz?

This afternoon, Google made a big push into the social media sphere with the introduction of Google Buzz. Naturally, tech bloggers have been quick to pounce on the news and have been analyzing Google’s latest offering from a thousand different angles (“What do competitors think of Buzz?” “How does Buzz affect mobile?” “Will Buzz be a change from Google’s history of failed social experiments?“) Before we jump into the fray with our own analysis of what Google Buzz (which we’ll share tomorrow and will focus on privacy and safety), however, we thought we should catch you up on what Google Buzz actually is.

Essentially, Google Buzz is Google’s attempt to compete with Facebook and Twitter in the area of real-time social sharing. This is an area that Google has been eager to explore, and has been tentatively testing for some time now with sporadic updates such as the recently unveiled Google Social Search. Centered around Google’s widely used e-mail platform, Gmail, Google Buzz takes the basic concept of status updates and expands on them by allowing the easy sharing of rich media such as videos, images, and more. Google Buzz also offers a fairly robust mobile service that incorporates elements of other up-and-coming social media sites, Foursquare and Gowalla.

Check out the following videos from Google explaining how Google Buzz works.

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Google was founded by engineers. As such, it’s no surprise that everything Google puts out revolves around organization. It’s what has distinguished the company from day one and what has made it the world’s leading search engine. When Google introduced Buzz this afternoon, one of their buzz words (pun definitely intended) was relevancy.

When you follow lots of people on a website like Facebook or Twitter, it can sometimes be hard to distinguish the most relevant information. With Google Buzz, Google claims that it is easy to follow the people that you interact with regularly, because the program is already incorporated into your Google account. Additionally, you can link your Twitter account to Google Buzz so that people who follow you on Google Buzz can see your Tweets (but not vice versa).

Conversely, however, Google Buzz does not play nice with Facebook, which could doom the program before it even gets started. With 400 million users worldwide, Facebook is the mecca of social media. However, for the most part, it is still a closed system. While the site has opened up significantly in the past few months, it is not known as the place for public sharing. Rather, Facebook is where you go to connect with your friends and share interesting content…aka the thing that Google Buzz wants to be. Unless there is an integration between the two services, it’s difficult to imagine people embracing another social media tool that they see as redundant.

Given these inherent limitations, I’m not entirely confident of Google’s success with Buzz, but it would be unwise to count the Big G out just yet. Of course, if Buzz doesn’t work, maybe Google can just buy Twitter out right. You can do that when you’ve cornered the search advertising market.

Anyway, now that we’ve explained what Google Buzz is, and some of the early opinions on the product, we’re going to take some time to delve deeply into how Google Buzz affects user privacy and reputation management. Be on the lookout for that post tomorrow.