There is a great comparison of social media is made in this article on Lifehacker . The article has a great breakdown of Buzz, Twitter, and Facebook. I kind of missed Google’s Buzz when it first came out. I found this article while looking it up. From what I’ve heard buzz is suppose to contend with Facebook, I haven’t had the chance to use it much.

I found it odd that the author chose to put only these three in the chart. The author mentions others explaining that they are “generally too niche to be compared in the same aspects and categories.” I would argue that buzz is too new to not have a niche and twitter isn’t really comparable to Facebook or Buzz at all.

This article had some really great comments. One comment had the above picture from this site. The picture includes a breakdown of more social media sites. One of the best questions brought up in was in a different comment by cal82, “… What about the most important factor: which network your network uses?” This has to be the number one reason to use a social media site. Are the people that you want to be social with using the site?

Buzz has a step up on this process by automatically including people that I follow in Google Reader. I use social media mainly for looking at and sharing interesting things, either from friends and family’s lives, or something someone else found on the internet. I use Facebook for most of this and Google Reader for the latter. However reader can be a little overwhelming if you don’t check it often enough and would like something that offers a little more filtering options. I’m going to have to see what direction Buzz goes, and how many people adopt it.

Google Buzz

Another idea by Google, this one is called Google Buzz. Today Google has released a new networking tool called Google Buzz, this tool allows the sharing of photos/images, videos and status updates using a new Gmail tab. These new features of Google Buzz will be on android based phones and with web based application; on the Iphone as well. This allows for real time updates to show up on a your Google Buzz feed. The new Google Buzz tab will show up on 1% of gmail account users starting today and the rest of Gmail account users will see the tab within the upcoming week.

Google Buzz boast 5 main features to try and make you change to their social network. First is that it blends in with Gmail. The Buzz tab will be next to your inbox label allowing you to see photos, videos and status updates. This feature also integrates the top 40 people you interact with on Gmail and Gchat and automatically adds them as friends. Second Feature is "Page Rank" for status updates. This features lets you like or dislike peoples update statuses and over time it determines whether to show the status update or not. The third feature is "Media gets Pulled IN" in that videos from Youtube and pictures from flickr and Picasa appear as thumbnails in Buzz. So when you click on a video or picture the thumnail plays/appear inline on your Buzz page. And you can also pull tweets from twitter into Buzz.

Google Buzz Demo

The Fourth feature is"Mobile Features", Google Buzz will appear as a mobile web application where you can make status updates by voice or geotag your post. Another interesting thing with this feature is that when your using Google mobile maps, buzz updates appear on the maps so that you can see and read location based updates. And you can also see any Buzz updates that have been made near your location. And the Last feature is "Public or Private", you can make your Buzz either public or private. Private updates can go just to your followers or a select group of people. The public updates are posted to your own Google profile and it is indexed in for Google search.