Google Gives Up on Orkut, Announces Google Buzz

Today Google delivered a much-anticipated new product announcement for a new social networking platform by the name of Google Buzz. Their strategy looks to, rather than build off of their investment with Orkut, to build new social network platform as an extension of Gmail. Interesting approach, and most likely a necessary departure based on the lack of Orkut’s success globally against Facebook. A few initial thoughts on what I saw and what it means:

• While using the popularity of Gmail as a great launching point was most likely Google’s best strategy for rapid user adoption and a good start for building my social graph within Buzz, I wonder if it’ll be enough. For those hardcore Google users that use Gmail as a primary email provider or Google Talk as a primary chat client, I have no doubt that Buzz will be an easy, natural addition to their Google experience.  For the rest of the world (including me) who don’t use either of those services as a primary method of communication, I’m left to manually build my social graph within Facebook. That’s a big ask considering users’ investments in building and maintaining these social graphs in environments such as Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn.
• I wonder what this means for the future of Orkut. Granted, Orkut never had the legs to compete with Facebook globally, but it did have success in a few international environments such as India and Brazil. A social product launch with no reference to Orkut doesn’t bode well for continued innovation with that platform.
• As is typical for a product announcement and demonstration, we didn’t get enough detail on core social topics such as privacy or integration options. While an open, social web is everyone’s goal, when considering the portability of both a user’s social graph and privacy preferences this conversation rapidly becomes complex. It’ll be interesting to see what’s under the hood here with Buzz.
• Completely and conspicuously absent from the announcement, demos and q&a were any sort of integration with any other social platform such as Twitter, Facebook, blog platforms, etc. For all the criticism Facebook gets for being a walled-in environment, they’ve done a great job of enabling integration with these platforms and providing a platform that can effectively integrate with anything. Google chose to launch only with integrations with Google products such as Gmail, Google Chat, Picasa and YouTube, which is curious for an announcement claiming to be the most open social web platform possible.
• What I found to be the most intriguing was the integration of locally aware information with Google Maps and their mobile offering. With their ongoing investments in Google Maps and Google Local, Google has been the defacto standard for local data worldwide. Using this investment to their advantage to instantly create the most locally-aware social platform was a savvy and powerful move. It effectively makes services such as Brightkite obsolete over time and pushes services such as FourSquare and Gowalla deeper into a mobile-game niche.
• Also noticeably absent was any reference to how this will effect Google search engine results. As with most things SEO related I’m sure we’ll be left to discover those effects on our own and it’s something we’ll have a keen eye on in the coming weeks and months.

Again these are a few, off the cuff thoughts on Buzz, I’m sure I’ll have more in 3 minutes when I can actually play with it. I’d be interested in your opinion on Buzz and what it means to the evolution of the social web. Comment here with what you’ve got!

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Tagged as: GMail, google buzz, orkut, Search, SEO, Social Media