You’ve probably heard by now about Google’s latest innovation: Google Buzz. It basically is a social media consolidator which can be easily integrated into your Gmail account. The application pulls in information from all your news feeds, blogs, photo sites, etc’and all this buzz can be ‘geo-tagged’?.
After several attempts to enter the social media scene, has Google finally gotten it right? Some users are saying they have. So far, the adoption rate of this new product has been huge–with tens of millions of users already participating.
Around my campus this week, I’ve heard some buzz on the Buzz. It seems as though my fellow students are seeing a future where nothing is a secret. Jokingly, one of my classmates posed the question: ‘So hypothetically, if you’re having an affair and you regularly email your mistress’this interaction is publicized since your most frequently emailed contacts are auto-followed?” Hopefully, this particular problem isn’t an issue for most, but I think his concern over infringed privacy is valid. All your interactions are now consolidated into one streaming, publicized feed. This week Google has already taken steps to increase the privacy for Buzzers who are not ready to have their public image be quite so uncensored.
With such a huge audience (potentially, all 38 million existing Gmail users), marketers should be paying attention. How are you getting involved in this new social arena?
