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Google announce Google Buzz: social media through Gmail

by Kingpin-SEO Agency

Google might own the world’s most popular search engine and video site, but one area where the Mountain View company isn’t doing quite as well is social media. This is a shame from them, considering the huge amount of money involved in services like Facebook and Twitter. Social media has been growing exponentially for the last few years.

While YouTube could be regarded as a social media site – the content, after all, is created by the community at large – it has only just started to make a profit for the company. When Google purchased YouTube in 2006, it was an incredibly successful but also loss making website.

Then of course there’s a large amount of products that Google run that have a ‘social’ edge to them, such as bookmarks and reader and of course the ‘email killer’ service, Google Wave, but these services lack the mass appeal and wide reaching features of a site like Facebook. They don’t tie together well either.

However, Google’s new plan for its social media has been unveiled and it’s the mail service Gmail as a base. It’s name? Google Buzz.

Buzz’s goal is to rival sites like Twitter and Facebook while also bringing together many of the services that are offered by Google.

The Google blog explained the service in more detail:

“Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch – it just works.”

While Google will have a long way to if it wants to truly rival sites like Facebook, having a service integrated with over 400 million Gmail accounts already is certainly a very good start, and SEO professionals should keep an eye on the potential of the service in the future.

posted on Feb 15, 2010

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