Google takes on Twitter and Facebook with Buzz

Google sought to put its blotchy record in the field of social networking behind it yesterday when it launched Buzz: a direct challenge to Facebook and Twitter.

The new service – not to be confused with Yahoo Buzz, which allows users to vote on their favourite news stories - will have an excellent head-start if it can capitalise on the 150 million active email users who currently subscribe to Google's Gmail.

Buzz appears as a link within the Gmail user's browser. Activating it is just a matter of clicking – at which point the user will be automatically set to receive updates from all their email contacts who are also users of Gmail. This is the equivalent of following someone on Twitter or being someone's friend on Facebook.

The idea of Buzz is for people to share videos, photographs or just thoughts. When a user posts a new item, they can share it either with their immediate friend group or the entire world wide web. When a user's friend posts an item, the user will likewise see that item in the Buzz interface. So far, so very Facebook.

What Google hopes to do with Buzz is to bring its search expertise to bear in an attempt to ensure the nuggets of gold are filtered out. A major complaint for users of Twitter, for example, is the amount of spam that genuine Twitterers have to wade through in order to find interesting updates.

Presenting Buzz, Bradley Horowitz, Google vice president for product development, said: "[Social networking is] a phenomenon that's real, but it's increasingly becoming harder and harder to make sense and find the signal in the noise."

Buzz is designed to work seamlessly with other Google services like YouTube and Picasa, which allowing users to share videos and photographs. Users’ activity on other sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo’s Flickr can also be shared. Buzz will prioritise those postings that it deems most interesting and relevant to the user. As Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager told CNN, Google's search engine will "collapse bad buzz and recommend the good buzz".

Despite the obvious insinuation that Google is going to do social networking better than Twitter and Facebook, the company's co-founder Sergey Brin claimed Buzz was not challenging the undisputed kings of social networking. He told a press conference: "Other social [networking] services focus on entertainment. I find them useful for productivity."

Taken with Horowitz's comment that "[Buzz] will change the way businesses communicate around the world."  The suggestion is that Google hopes to monetise social networking in a way that Twitter and Facebook have so far failed to do.

Google has tried to crack social networking before, in the form of Orkut. Although very successful in Brazil and to a lesser extent India, its audience of 100 million active users is well behind Facebook's 350 million. But in social networking, a world based around the notion of finding and sharing new things, perhaps people are ready to move on from Facebook and Twitter. ·