Buzz off…..to a mediocre start

by Dinilohlanga Mekuto

By now you should have heard of social networking sites, websites where you can connect with friends and share your thoughts and pictures with people you know and those you may not know. One such website is Facebook, which is reported to have over 200 million active users world-wide. There is nothing new here ofcourse, but interestingly enough, there might be a new kid on the block, one that threatens to give “fb” – as Facebook is known by its regurlar users – a run for its money.

This new kid on the block is called Buzz,Google Buzz.Like any product Buzz as it is known, was launched amidst great media hype. But many avid social networking sites users sought to know what Buzz would offer, that Twitter and Facebook didn’t.
Before we get to what Buzz offers,let me first give a brief explanation of Twitter and Facebook. Twitter is an online medium where you share your views or comments (via tweets) with your “followers” by texting or typing no more than 140 characters. It allows users to post links of websites or webpages and allows the user to respond,by re-tweet – RT @ someone, through a public platform. Facebook is more complicated than that, it allows you to invite people as friends,request friendships,reject friends,comment publicly (status update) or privately (inbox message), and allows you to do million other things because of it’s application features! All these media are a way of keeping intouch with the world.
Now buzz is Google’s other attempt at unsitting Facebook as the number one choice for online social networking. It’s prior attempt Google Wave did not quite take off as expected. This can be blamed on the process for joining the service (google-wave). You had to be invited by someone to be part of Google wave,i.e. you couldn’t just go to the website and register. Things are a little bit different with Buzz, you have to have a G-mail account to be a buzzer.Two weeks back as I was logging in to my gmail account, I was asked if I wanted to join Google Buzz by an automated message,I accepted the invitation but have not yet used the service. My failure to do so cannot be blamed on google but on the recent internet connection problems I have been experiencing at work.
So in my quest to find out what Buzz brings to the table,I decided to ask a few Facebook friends to give their own opinion on this new google product.I received mixed re-actions, one friend said “It’s more like twitter but much better. There’s just one thing that annoys me: they send you an email everytime someone comments on your buzz(like FB). They don’t have to because buzz is within gmail so you can see when you have new buzz. other than that,it’s the best thing ever!”.
Another friend responded “I thnk its a fail! Wldnt leave Twitter 4 it. Just gr8 coz its an extension of Gmail, but i wldnt use it tho”. What I gathered from these responses is that there isn’t much of a difference between the two – Buzz and Facebook – services.
Judging from what I have heard, I don’t think Buzz brings anything new to the table besides privacy! And this has been a major concern on Facebook for quite some time. For example,I happened to log on to my facebook account only to find that my profile picture had changed to a pornographic image! Such problems and the fact that the Facebook interface or lay-out changes no less than twice each year can be annoying. It is funny that everytime there is a new Facebook lay-out people vent their anger and frustration on their status updates but three days down the line,they seem to be happy and comfortable with the new lay-out. This shows that though people are reluctant towards change, in the fast paced age of information technology,people adapt easily to change. And that is why we keep logging on to “fb”.
Buzz is new and is a product of one of the biggest internet companies which seeks to take over the world wide web and its resources. This might even be a way of Google trying to lure everyone to use gmail as their preferred email service provider.They have managed to unsit Yahoo! as the premier search engine,and now seek to do the same with Facebook. Whether buzz succeeds to unsit the addictive Facebook or not, it remains to be seen, but it surely brings worthy opposition to the bullying facebook. To tell you the truth I do not think there is anything new with buzz, it is only another alternative to what we already have. On that note let me update my Facebook status…