The Buzz about Google Buzz and its effects on your SEO

Details: Thursday, 14 April 2011 18:57; Hits: 356

Google Buzz is the latest attempt by Google to present us with a viable, easy to use, take-everywhere social network. Before you decide this is part of Google’s control freakery fuelled by its motto “to index the world’s information” it might pay to take one tiny weensy step back and get a better perspective.

Google closed the first decade of the 21st century with the implementation of ideas which showed that it was leveraging its success in the search engine world and was trying to be all things to all men, competing not just with other search engines but with everyone in everything.

Orkut and Gmail became direct competitors of Yahoo! groups and Hotmail, Google Books started to take on Amazon, the Google Android phone was squaring up against the iPhone, Google Chrome (still in Beta) was fighting against Firefox and IE and the Android operating system for netbooks, based squarely on the Chrome code, was beginning to take on Microsoft’s OS hegemony.

Is there anyone which Google took on and I’ve left out of the picture? Well, yes there is. Google also took on WordPress with Blogger and Google Pages, Microsoft’s WorkSpace with Google Wave and with MySpace and YouTube it tried to place itself squarely at the focal point of everyone’s digital life and just so that we don’t forget it also took on eBay’s PayPal service by launching Google Checkout and launched its own bookmarking service called Google Reader.

As the first decade of the 21st century came to a close a funny thing happened. Facebook, which started life as a get-together place for College kids, served more news pages and more news content than Google itself. This is staggering (though it makes sense) as those of us who did use Google to find out a story then rushed off to Facebook to share it with our friends and they shared it with their friends and so on. This is as natural as it is easy to comprehend. Our online behavior does not differ that much from our offline behavior which means that word-of-mouth or the digital equivalent which devolves into tweets, pokes, emails and sharing, still carries more weight than any other means of serving content.

All of this, naturally enough, brings me full close to Google Buzz which is designed to take on Facebook head on. Will it work? Well, here’s the catch. Microsoft has retooled its search engine and recently launched Google Social Search designed to specifically take into account social networking trends and promotions with a view to, eventually, using social network popularity as one of the metrics for serving content. This means that Google, which was born on the web, gets it. The company understands the stickiness of social networking and it also understands that unless it establishes a credible presence there it will become another Microsoft desperately chipping at the heels of the leaders.

With more than 400 million users worldwide Facebook is definitely the leading force in social networking and its pervasiveness, quite possibly, makes it that rarest of all online commodities: a site which lends itself to partial attention so well that it becomes immediately sticky. Its stickiness has encouraged online marketers, search engine optimizers and search engines themselves to sit up and take notice.

It would have been unnatural if Google did nothing. Its Buzz has been linked to Gmail in an attempt to jump-start membership through its 179 million users worldwide. Whether it will succeed or fail will depend on the one criterion we apply when we judge any of the free online tools we use: what’s in it for us?