Buzz Saw

The interwebs are buzzing...

Can you feel it? It’s the vibration of a new assimilation tool for social media’s Borg-like interconnected collective. Is resistance futile? With 176 million Gmail accounts and growing, is Google poised to usurp its competitors as the SM hive Queen? With the introduction of Buzz, the question of the moment, quite literally, is no longer “What are you doing?” or “What’s on your mind?” Instead, assuming Google’s social (media) engineers have truly tapped into the missing link in our minute by minute collective connective, and that assumes plenty, we’re being asked (or have the opportunity depending on your world view) to go beyond the status message. Buzz’s conversation starter is reminiscent of that first comfortable, quiet moment in a new relationship when your partner asks slowly and with marked sincerity, “What are you thinking?” Google's verbiage is only slightly less smooth, “Share updates, photos, videos, and more. Start conversations about the things you find interesting.”

Whether Buzz is busy buzz-sawing and cannibalizing its cousin, Wave, or helping to groom it as the future of email (too bad the Gmail moniker is taken), for the foreseeable future it will be locked in an unmistakable three-way battle for your online “me” time. With 400 million friends, the juggernaut, Facebook, is not going away anytime soon. If its proof you seek, think about this... According to the site, there are 89,000,000 active e-agrarians using the Farmville application! Yep, that’s an eighty-nine with six zeros! Twitter, by comparison, boasts somewhere between one and six million active users based on a which web analytics site you trust. One fact is obvious, however, the number of tweets per month is GROWING!

In November of 2009, the popular SM blog Mashable asked readers to vote on their favorite SM service. The results favored Facebook with 48 percent of the vote to Twitter’s 40 percent. Fast forward to two days ago and Mashable asked its readers the same question, only this time throwing the mere days-old Buzz into the mix. This time, 47 percent of respondents displayed Facebook favoritism, while 18 percent feel the Buzz and 26 percent plan to continue tweeting with Twitter. Pretty clear evidence, at least in SM circles, that baby Buzz is taking candy straight from Twitter’s beak.

Let’s face it, in a time-constraint free world, Facebook is our own personal website, Twitter satisfies our need to quick-connect and emote, and Buzz allows for content heavy conversation with cleaner multimedia and location sharing. And while Facebook and Twitter updates can be programmed as mirror replicas, and you can gadgetize your Gmail to include Facebook and Twitter a mere mouse click away from Buzz, staying abreast of all three will be a challenge to all but the most devoted social mediaficionados. Ari Milner describes this embedded SM set up as his “social command center.” Typical drone terminology. Maybe resistance is futile.

POLL
What do you think:
A. Facebook is my one and only
B. Give me Twitter or give me death
C. Who's the pretty new girl in school, Buzz?
D. I like to "play the field"