Google Tries Social Again with Buzz, This Time Going After Everything Including Wave

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Google is again trying to conquer the social arena. This time with Google Buzz. Will it fall to the wayside like Opensocial or will it rise to the top above Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and all other microblogging / status / location based services?

One of the coolest things about working at Google is that employees are encouraged to create new and innovative products. While the core of Google’s business is advertising, Google tries to make as many products as possible. In other words they shotgun development and when all the shooting is done they see what they can do with the remains.

Google Buzz looks a lot like Google Wave. Wave was a huge buzz (pun intended) but as soon as beta testers got their hands on it, they quickly realized that even the developers of Google Wave has no idea how to really use it. It is really complicated and confusing. Maybe in a year or two people will understand it better, but for now it’s a mess.

In comes Google Buzz, which seems to be very similar to Google Wave, only that it’s working now and incorporated into Gmail.

Google Buzz seems like a good idea, since email is already a very understood medium and still considered the number one social app.

But why does Google seems to cross paths with their products. Why do they confuse us so? Why don’t they just move Wave were Buzz is and continue to grow the idea of Wave. Now they have two paths that users can jump onto and therefore will separate the public acceptance between the two. Please, Google, just make an executive decision as to what social app you want to push and push it!

Buzz also wants to differentiate itself another way: social curation. As Mike wrote about the other night,the social web right now is largely a mess. There’s simply too much going on
Source Techcrunch

How can Google Buzz differentiate itself when it’s really trying to be all things at once?

I agree, it is a mess, but what can you do? Do you want to stop companies from trying to make new services that can possibly change our lives? Of course not. But with overlap and separation between the services it’s inevitable that a big pile of junk will appear.

One thing I am excited to see is if Google Buzz is using pubsubhubbub which is a new technology that allows real time content updates via pushes… not queries. It’s like Twitter only you can pass anything like video, images, blog posts.