Jimmy Gilmore

Yes­ter­day Google launched Google Buzz with a “so what” that rang much clearer but with less of a let down than last weeks iPad intro­duc­tion. It’s not fully acti­vated so I haven’t used it on my desk­top Gmail yet (yes, I acti­vated it) but it is work­ing on my iPhone. It looks inter­est­ing but I’m not really excited about it yet because it won’t be all that use­ful until lots of peo­ple adopt it like they have Face­book and Twit­ter. And as long as it’s tied to a Gmail account, I don’t see that hap­pen­ing quickly. For exam­ple Hot­mail has a much larger user base than Gmail. And what about all the Yahoo, AOL, AT&T, Com­cast, and pri­vate domain email addresses that peo­ple aren’t going to want to aban­don to have their email account attached to Google Buzz? But maybe that’s Google’s strat­egy — to get peo­ple off com­peti­tors products.

Google is one of the most impor­tant play­ers, if not the most impor­tant player on the inter­net today. It con­trols what we see on the inter­net when we search. And they can effect what we don’t see. But today on the inter­net,  Face­book is the clos­est thing to a social hub. So far from Google we have Google Con­nect, Wave, YouTube, Okurt, Picasa, Sidewiki and now Google Buzz — none of these are any­thing close to a hub for most inter­net users.

For us who blog, we already know that the two top ways to organ­i­cally drive traf­fic is SEO and with social tools. As social con­tin­ues to grow SEO and SEM (Google’s main busi­ness) will become less and less dom­i­nant. This means Googles dom­i­nance of the Inter­net will wain to an extent if they don’t gain more con­trol of how we inter­act socially on the Web. Cou­ple that with Microsoft’s aggres­sive tac­tics with Bing, and they have a real inter­est in invest­ing heav­ily social tools.

What does that mean? It means I’m excited to see what Google comes up with and how these tools evolve over time. But I’m not see­ing this as any huge game changer.