Rivals swat Google Buzz

Google’s rivals have lined up to slam its social-networking service, dubbed Buzz.

Buzz delivers updates from Twitter, Flickr and Picasa into Gmail, with Google promising to reduce the “information overload” caused by the spiralling number of social networks in our lives.

However, while Google crowed about the service the PR departments of Microsoft and Yahoo were whirring into life.

Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation

“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation,” Microsoft claims. “We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”

It was a similar story from Yahoo, which immediately tweeted “Two years after Yahoo launched Buzz, Google follows suit. Check out the original: http://buzz.yahoo.com/”

It swiftly followed this with a more straight forward release. “It’s been almost a year and a half since we first launched Yahoo Updates – a social feature that lets people share their status, content and online activities and stay connected to what their friends and family are doing on Yahoo.”

The two companies are clearly rattled, but do they have a reason? Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Interpret, believes they do. “Despite mediocre past attempts at social networking products such as Okrut or Dodgeball, Buzz is likely to attract a strong following by virtue of it’s tight integration into Gmail and the ability for Google to expose the service to advanced as well as novice users immediately,” he writes on his blog.

“While Twitter users won’t likely transplant their followers and followings to Buzz, new users who have not embraced Twitter or tried and abandoned it are likely to give Buzz a try,” he concludes.