Google Buzz – Twitter killer?

There has been a lot of (excuse the pun) buzz surrounding Google Buzz since it’s launch, some controversy around its privacy settings due to the way it initially made all people in their contacts list follow them, this has however been rectified since launch and now recommends who to follow.

On the face of it Google Buzz should be a Twitter ‘killer’ for the want of a better term, it has the IT behemoth that is Google behind it which in itself gives the service wide coverage and credibility right off the bat. It has a more advanced feature set than that of twitter, supporting threaded conversations, instant updating so need to refresh, pictures and video embedded into the posts rather than having to use 3rd party sites such as twitpic.

However, despite all of these technological advantages over Twitter, im still not sure that it will be the big hit that Google wants. Why if you already use Twitter would you move to Buzz when all of the people you know and are interested in likely already use Twitter? That is the main driving factor for using a social service such as Twitter, it isn’t necessarily the features that you like the most, its the people that make the service what it is and Twitter has that in abundance with Celebrities and big corporations using it for news and product announcements.

Google has tried to negate this factor by allowing integration with your other services such as Facebook, Twitter etc but there really is just no incentive to switch over to a service where most of the people you currently follow aren’t.

I believe that Google’s tight integration of Buzz into their Android handsets could prove to be popular and help sell people on Buzz with excellent use of their mapping software mapping out where Buzz’s are coming from locally to you and helping you find local trends and topics of conversation.

When it comes down to it now, Twitter is almost as synonymous with social networking as facebook is and Google will have a hard time shifting Twitter as the king of the quick message and replace it with Buzz.