A Tale of Three Buzzes

Google's Buzz is causing a stink. It's the third social network which is called "Buzz" to come out recently. All have the Twitter model of microblogging (or multicast chat) with an asymmetric social graph (people decide who they follow but not who follows them).

Yahoo Buzz has been out for at least a year on buzz.yahoo.com and predicatably, Yahoo and their new overlords Microsoft are going batshit insane about this.

Oh really Microsoft? You've got a product and a bigger competitor comes along and uses your idea? And they use the generic term to name it? That must be annoying. The worm has turned.

And the drones at AT&T launched buzz.com about 6 months ago. Less said about that the better. In fact you can probably safely forget them right now.

So now we'll all be looking forward to the shakedown. There are too many players.

I think the winner will be the service that provides enough features (not necessarily the most, Facebook) with the best integration with everything else. Twitter so far has been successful at crowdsourcing the integration work with the massive proliferation of Twitter clients and "tweet this" buttons like Tweetmeme. Can Yahoo/Microsoft get this traction?

Google already has a great integration story. When the hundreds of millions of monthly GMail users hit their inbox now, they will be able to thread together lots of their google software that produces socialisable events. Now the google suite can buzz.

Perhaps it's just me but the one image I have about Buzz is those hotted up cars with the ultra-loud stereo systems and the monsterous bass frequencies causing every bolt in the chassis to loosen and the number plate to buzz.