Google released its new social features to users on their mobile phones and inside the popular Gmail client last Tuesday.  It has been less than a week and the new Google Buzz social web seems to be an instant hit by any metric you want to use.  There were many who where very weary of Google attempting to enter the social networking market, but it seems that they will not have a problem gaining new users even though other giants like Facebook are making many new changes to retain customers/members.

If you have been using the Google Friend Connect then you have most likely noticed that the search engine mogul has been laying the groundwork to create their own social engine for some time.  They have all the main features and more already in place and they have yet to find the perfect way to tie them all together.  It is popular speculation that they will wait until the release of the Google OS to really make everything come together in harmony. However, the Google Buzz social features are a sure way to test the public’s reaction to them becoming a new player in the Social Networking marketplace.

The social functions actually hit the cell phones before it was actually available to people using it from the gmail client.  It is interesting that they see so much potential in the mobile market that they actually turned Google Buzz loose there first.  Since it has been released there have been over 9 million messages and comments, so it seems that they have the infrastructure in place to handle a pretty serious load from it’s users.  In the past huge rollouts like this one from Google have been done on an incremental basis to slowly raise the server load on the Google Cloud, but his time they did not seem to wait around.

Marketers will find this to be a much better instant communication service than twitter.  The only thing is that this service starts to blur the line between chat, email and buzz.  How will you choose to communicate with Google.  It seems that Google may actually have too many services and it may be time to consolidate some services after the community decides which tools are going to be used the most.

One big push of the Google Buzz social features set, it the location services which allows you and your friends to make updates that show your geographic location.  This is nothing new to some social sites, but is a first for google.  there are some security issues that may have to be worked out on this, mostly for children.  However, so far Google seems to have a winner on their hands.

Allowing users to post publicly or only to their list of friends is a great feature to make each Google Buzzer in control over who see’s their information.  The recent release of Google Wave seems to be swept under the table after all the fan fare that the Google Buzz is creating.  We wonder if these 2 will soon come together as a singular form of communication though.

The one thing that is for sure is that Google Buzz is here to stay and Twitter and Facebook better watch out, because there is new competition in town and it’s Google Buzz!

Nick Simpson