Education and Google Buzz…A Match?

It seems, Google has thrown down the gauntlet…Google Buzz is a incredibly powerful attempt to take a piece of Facebook’s market share in social networking. Google Buzz is powerful because if you have a Gmail account you are already a member. Within minutes of logging in to my Gmail account I had followers and I was following a number of people. This is how “friending” and “following” on Google Buzz works. Google has filtered users’ Gmail inboxes and Google Talk IM contacts and used algorithms to determine the users that they communicate with most frequently. Users can then share Buzz posts with the world (and Google search), or they can share privately through their existing Gmail groups or custom-made groups in Buzz. Here are a few a videos that explain the tool in more detail:

When I logged in for the first time with buzz activated, I could not believe my father was instantly among the people I was following. I liked that, no more sending him links… he is not a “first adopter” like me, and if Google can get him to interact with the social stream I am impressed. I’m not sure liked the asymmetric follower/friend model, though, because there were a few people that appeared on my list that I did not want knowing my business… or my whereabouts, so this feature made me a bit uncomfortable.