Yesterday Google launched Google Buzz with a “so what” that rang much clearer but with less of a let down than last weeks iPad introduction. It’s not fully activated so I haven’t used it on my desktop Gmail yet (yes, I activated it) but it is working on my iPhone. It looks interesting but I’m not really excited about it yet because it won’t be all that useful until lots of people adopt it like they have Facebook and Twitter. And as long as it’s tied to a Gmail account, I don’t see that happening quickly. For example Hotmail has a much larger user base than Gmail. And what about all the Yahoo, AOL, AT&T, Comcast, and private domain email addresses that people aren’t going to want to abandon to have their email account attached to Google Buzz? But maybe that’s Google’s strategy – to get people off competitors products.

Google is one of the most important players, if not the most important player on the internet today. It controls what we see on the internet when we search. And they can effect what we don’t see. But today on the internet,  Facebook is the closest thing to a social hub. So far from Google we have Google Connect, Wave, YouTube, Okurt, Picasa, Sidewiki and now Google Buzz – none of these are anything close to a hub for most internet users.

For us who blog, we already know that the two top ways to organically drive traffic is SEO and with social tools. As social continues to grow SEO and SEM (Google’s main business) will become less and less dominant. This means Googles dominance of the Internet will wain to an extent if they don’t gain more control of how we interact socially on the Web. Couple that with Microsoft‘s aggressive tactics with Bing, and they have a real interest in investing heavily social tools.

What does that mean? It means I’m excited to see what Google comes up with and how these tools evolve over time. But I’m not seeing this as any huge game changer.

Posted on: February 10, 2010, by : Jimmy Gilmore