Google’s social network killer is upon us and it is called Buzz. It is the tool that has Facebook screaming in agony, twitter paralyzed with terror and tumblr, posterous, gowalla, and foursquare raising a collective eyebrow.

The first iteration of Buzz is nothing more than a light version of my personal favorite social network, (queue angelic music) FriendFeed. It allows you to aggregate content from other social networks, including twitter, and also create your own content via a picture, link or text driven buzz. From the content it is possible to create threaded conversations, an area where Twitter is sorely lacking [Hashtags are horrible. You drop and disrespect them all of the time. Admit it.] and that Facebook and Friendfeed both have very firm handles on.

What’s the Point?

With any new take on an existing platform you have to ask yourself what the point is. This point is to steal market share [of course.] Buzz basically validates that Google thinks that FriendFeed was the correct approach. So what does it have that FriendFeed lacks? Nothing, right?

Wrong.

The answer is prominence¹.

FriendFeed is out of sight out of mind, but there are over 146 million users of gmail² and they were all greeted with a splash screen that told them about Buzz. So while Google may have plans to differentiate themselves from FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter in the future, right now the fact is that they have exposed themselves to an audience that is larger than the size of Russia. If Buzz begats buzz, look for Google to make a larger investment and a more feature-rich platform. Analytics anyone?

¹Yes, the mobile app has some cool location based features too.
²Arrington, Michael (2009-07-09). “Bing Comes to Hotmail”. Techcrunch. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/09/bing-comes-to-hotmail/. Retrieved 2009-07-11. “Hotmail is still by far the largest web mail provider on the Internet, with 343 million monthly users according to Comscore. Second and third are Yahoo (285 million) and Gmail (146 million).”