The recent release of Google Buzz was greeted with a predictable amount of fanfare, with everyone offering an opinion on whether or not Google had finally rolled out a service that could compete with Facebook and other social networking sites.
So what’s the verdict? If you believe most people who have tried out Google Buzz, it still has a long way to go before it will be competing for eyeballs with the other leading social networking sites.
Why?
In short, it offers too much information, and there’s no clear “killer app.”
The goal of Buzz seems to be a one-stop-shop for content from a range of social networking sites. You can see your friend’s blog posts, status updates, their photo albums, and a whole lot more. Of course this brings us to one of Buzz’s most glaring drawbacks: it offers connections to all those social networking sites, but none to Facebook. Google obviously wants to challenge Facebook for the social networking market. But leaving out Facebook makes Google Buzz a whole lot less comprehensive than it would like to be.
Then there’s the whole privacy issue. When it was released, Google Buzz automatically linked people to their regular Gmail contacts. This let others see who their contacts were following. Many may not care about something like that, but imagine someone like a doctor, who has both patients and friends in her Gmail contacts. They would be able to see each other. That’s an invasion of privacy that few would welcome.
This has generated a lot of heat for Google in the past week, so we won’t go over it here, other than saying that Google quickly changed the Buzz policy after that blunder and now only has a list of people it suggests that you follow, instead of automatically connecting people.
So what do you think? Will Google Buzz recover from it’s initial lukewarm reviews? Can it seriously challenge Facebook? Will Google eventually cave and allow connecting with Facebook? Let us know.
There’s a lot that goes into effective 
