Schupp Company Blog

Google Enters The Social Media Octagon

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Like millions of other Gmail users, this week I saw the introduction of Google’s newest media venture Buzz. It works pretty much just like Twitter, only through your Gmail account. Google says, “Buzz is a new way to share updates, photos, videos and more, and start conversations about the things you find interesting.” And lucky for all of us, we’re already set up to follow the people we email and chat with the most.

You can feed your Buzz updates from Facebook and Twitter, but not visa versa. So your tweets can be sent out to your Buzz followers, but you won’t be able to see updates of those you follow on Twitter through Buzz. There’s only one-way sharing across these platforms. So for all of those who were caught in the MySpace-Facebook transition, you might be updating two accounts simultaneously. This is truly genius on Google’s part. They use the current quick-update darling to fuel content (and followers) for their growing monster, essentially sucking the lifeblood right out of Twitter.

So the question looms, can Google overtake the ever-expanding Twittersphere? Or is this an effort to keep up and remain relevant? Google does have an ace in the hole. They’re Google. The have the users. They have the search engine. They have the eyes of the world on them every second of the day.

So much like my dormant MySpace page from 2003, how will my Twitter account survive as more and more users login to post on Buzz? You can’t ignore them. And you can’t deny Google. I have a feeling I’ll keep both going for a while, using Twitter as my main point of entry. But as the Buzz following slowly overtakes the Twitter followers in numbers and likely sort/search options, I’ll have no choice but to leave Twitter in the nest and make the complete transition over to Buzz.

Goodbye, Twitter. This is Google’s world now.

Tags: Buzz, Google, social media, Twitter, World Domination
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