Today, Google announced their newest product: Google Buzz. Here’s their intro video, as always with Google, quite nicely done. As you will be able to see, Google Buzz will be conveniently located in your Google Mail account (if you have one only, of course), and will allow you to connect to different social web applications from this unique location.
It makes me think a bit about Google Wave in terms of collaboration, but also quite obviously ressembles Twitter and Facebook as well as photo sharing websites. But that’s to be expected of a service that will bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Ok, wrong movie. ;) Still, it will very likely make Google even more powerful and, of course, allow them to gather even more data about its users. And we all know that gathering data about consumers is like printing your own money. But it’s Google and they’re cool, right?
Sarcasm aside, there are other services which offer to combine your different social networking sites on one website to make accessing them easier for you. I can’t say whether they’ll have access to your data or are merely doing it out of pure selflessness, but it’s clear that Google don’t do it because they want to help you manage your online life better. They do it because they can. And because… well, the idea is good. Keeping up with what’s happening on your different social sites is quite a bit of work. Personally, I’ve at least five accounts with services like Twitter, Xing, Facebook etc. and probably a few others that aren’t all that important. Being able to eventually access them from one single account would be great. Sure, Google would know even more about me. On the other hand, Google already knows that I’ve got a Xing profile. They know my YouTube and Twitter accounts. They quite likely also know what I buy at Amazon. They know basically my entire browsing history. They probably know the content of my Google Docs files. Or could, if they were so inclined.
So what? We’re more and more moving towards what consumer protectors call “transparent human being” anyway and I don’t think there’s anything or anyone that can stop this process. Admittedly, I wouldn’t want anyone to know my medical history aside from my doctor, but having, for example, one single profile for every person in a country to which are linked data from your driver’s license, taxes, ID card, marital and family information etc, would make life a lot easier. No more telling twenty different services that you moved, for example. One letter (or, eventually maybe, one DE-mail) and you’re done. The services would then proceed with creating updated ID cards etc. for you which you could fetch in one go.
But I disgress. I’ll definitely check out Google Buzz as soon as it’s available in my Gmail account, probably in the next one or two days and see whether it will really improve my online social life or whether it’s, a bit like Google Wave, a hyped product rather than all that useful.
