Google is having another go at a social media offering, and this time it looks like the company may be on the right track. Google Buzz was rolled out en masse this week, to largely positive reviews. The service has a few rough edges, but has quite a bit of potential.
If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Google is having a yet another go at a social media platform, this time with Google Buzz. Buzz meshes input from third party social media sites like Flickr and Twitter, and pulls in Google Mail, Google Talk, Google Reader, and a number of other features in a way that makes for a compelling platform. Has Google finally gotten it right? Buzz has a few glitches, but the final product is worth a look.
Last year, Google generated a ton of hype around Wave and plenty of people were convinced that Wave was going to be a fantastic collaboration tool that would mesh real-time and asynchronous communication and provide the next big collaboration and communication platform. Far from being the social media and collaboration tool of dreams, when Wave finally hit the beach it was with all the grace of a dead whale. In addition to the platform’s obvious technical flaws, the roll-out was too slow, giving only a small sub-section of users access — leaving many users with no one to collaborate with on a collaboration platform.
Google obviously learned a few things from the Wave launch. Whereas Google Wave was hyped out of proportion, Buzz was launched with a minimal amount of hype and announced as the company was ready to start rolling it out to users. Avoiding the long waits for invites, which hampered Wave’s usefulness from the start, was a smart move. Some folks may still be waiting on Buzz accounts, but most of the GMail users I know now have Buzz at their fingertips already. It took maybe 18 hours for Buzz to hit critical mass among users with existing Google accounts.
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