Need another reason to strengthen your social media initiative? How about the fact that Google, one of the biggest online players in the world, is now staking it’s claim to the stratospheric number of online users on social networks.

The search engine giant unveiled late yesterday, Google Buzz.Google Buzz will allow Gmail users to social connect, similar to Facebook, which is now 400 million fans strong worldwide and has created an online information and advertising community like no other. Google wants a piece of that pie, along with the advertising dollars that could potentially follow.

Here is a smart move by Google, there is nothing Gmail users have to do to start using Google Buzz, it will just show up on their email page when they log in over the next few days.

More impressive may be the mobile app Google has built in concert with Buzz. Google says smart phone users will be able to see friends around them on a Google map, and share comments, pictures, and videos. In other words, social geo-tracking. Just navigate to buzz.google.com on their phone. For instance – accident on the way home from work – update your social status and your friends see your update along with a map that shows where you sent the update from.

The Google Buzz mobile app is also a way of getting on the Apple Iphone. Something Apple has been trying to limit since the launch of it’s app store.

Granted this is a gift from Google for it’s Gmail users and anyone can sign up for the free mail service.The question is will there be options for media companies to connect to their users and viewers via Google Buzz, similar to Friend and Fan pages on Facebook and MySpace? That is something that is being worked out. Only personal accounts are being fired up at the moment. Something tells me this won’t be the last we hear or see of Buzz.

It does create fierce competition for Twitter, a microblog service that still has fully developed a business plan. Buzz will also give Google and incredible amount of information on location based messaging. You have to believe there is another ad platform in there somewhere, relatively untapped by other mobile companies.

Log in.. sign up.. check it out and let me know what you think. Hope to see your comments here or on our Facebook page at AR&D.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.