Digital News Report – As Google unveiled their social networking solution today insider wonder if Facebook will be displaced similar to the way Facebook displaced MySpace? Sure MySpace is still popular, but Facebook has garnered more popularity over the past couple years.
What do you do if you can’t buy a major social networking site? Start your own. But will Google be successful? They saw what Wikipedia has done with with their online encyclopedia. Their search results are always ranking within the top five, it seems. Google’s solution was Sites, which didn’t perform as they hoped.
They may have a better chance to gather an audience with Buzz because it is tied to their g-mail. People sign-up using an account they already have. Their friends are already listed and indexed by the search giant.
Both Microsoft and Yahoo have been slamming the new offering from Google. Doesn’t Google Buzz sound similar to Yahoo Buzz. Yahoo started their own Buzz back in 2008 as part of Yahoo Updates. Yahoo Buzz is very similar to Digg. Like Google, Yahoo used their Yahoo Mail to find your friends. In December Yahoo said Buzz wasn’t working and decided to “deeply integrate” Facebook Connect into Yahoo Updates, according to a report from CNN.
Google has already tried to produce their own social networking site. Orkut, established in 2004, is still around but not very popular in the United States. It is popular in India and Brazil. Since then Google has moved that operation to Brazil.
Orkut has over 100 million members today. Compare that to Facebook which has 350 million and overtook MySpace in 2008 by more than 100 million users, according to TechCrunch. Since Google decided to integrate their Buzz with Gmail, they already have 176 million new users.
Microsoft may be concerned the most. Microsoft has made a $240 million investment in Facebook. Do you think their experiment will work. Give us your comment below.
By: Sam Lee
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