It's time for another episode of the social media monthly round-up. Last month the internet and online market was busy with a flurry of activity. Google’s shift into social search and relevant areas topped the news in February. More specifically, there was a lot of buzz going around about Google's new product Google Buzz.
Google Introduces Google Buzz
Google has taken another big step in making a strong presence on the social web with the introduction of Google Buzz. The new social media site boasts features similar to Twitter and Facebook. (although is seems to be lacking integration from Facebook at all.) Integrated with Gmail, this new product allows members to start conversations about things they find interesting. Users can then publish it publicly or privately. Additional functions of Google Buzz include importing your connections from Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader, updates and comments can be integrated with mail, seeing updates in real-time and much more. Google is certainly hoping that Buzz is going to give the company a dominant social media website unique features.
Google did more than introduce Buzz in February. The news of Google’s integration of Facebook status updates into its real-time search results also garnered some attention. Apple CEO Steve Job’s reaction towards Google’s debut into the smart phone industry also produced some interesting news. He stated that: “We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake, they want to kill the iPhone”. One thing is sure, the social media scene is getting attention from all areas of the search marketing world.
Facebook News
According to the newly released data from compete.com Facebook has swept over Yahoo as the number 2 most popular website in the world with a high user engagement and huge user base. Facebook got 133 million unique visitors last month. Bing enhanced search co-operation with Facebook, allowing Facebook users full access to Bing’s search features.
Twitter Talks
VentureBeat quoting Comscore stats says that Twitter has experienced an increase in their traffic by 9 percent from December to January. This is mostly because of Google’s launch of real-time search. Yahoo! and Twitter signed a partnership deal to show a wider range of Twitter updates in Yahoo’s search results. This offers another surefire way to increase the traffic of Twitter.
Social Media Scan
- Yahoo Answers gets a facelift with some fairly strong functional changes added.
- Google bought the question-answer search service Aardvark for $50 million and put it in Google Labs.
- Google is giving $2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation. This was announced by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales through his tweet.
- European and U.S. regulatory have given approval to the historic deal between Bing and Yahoo!.
- Document managing Xerox Corp. sues Google and Yahoo! over search patents.
That is a very informative piece of information on Social Media Asha. Its a good way to follow up with trends from some of the industry. I think I am going to wait for this one every month.
Google buzz is really interesting.It has indeed turned normal Gmail accounts into a social media powerhouse. The biggest benefit that i felt about buzz is that, one less browser window and one less login because email, chat, and social media functions are in one place.