Google has watched more or less on the sidelines as social-networking sites — most notably Facebook and Twitter — have captured the public’s attention. Facebook, especially, has become more than a destination web site. It has become a user-centric world where users communicate via status updates, third-party applications, and shared groups.
While Google has made various attempts to gain traction in the social web, nothing has really worked. So on Tuesday, Google gave notice that it’s serious about the social web with its announcement of Google Buzz — a new feature of its Gmail web-based e-mail system.
Rather than simply adding status updates to Gmail, Google is pouring on the social-networking juice in an attempt to exploit the growing user base of Gmail.
Gmail: Social Network
“Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works,” product manager Todd Jackson wrote in an announcement blog post.
Buzz will take advantage of the social network inherent in e-mail by “automatically setting you up to follow the people you e-mail and chat with the most,” Jackson said.
How will this impact Facebook and Twitter? Not too much, said Ben Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, in an e-mail. “It really boils down to Google attempting to get folks to spend more time with their assets,” he said. “Time will tell how this works out, but I don’t really see this as a threat to Facebook or Twitter, given that neither of those services has been cannibalized by each other.”
Buzz is intended to be 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…