Google Buzz: welcome to the air-conditioned WOM cell?

If you’re not yet familiar with Google’s next next-big-thing, Google Buzz, then have a quick look at the official vid below to get up to speed – or click through to one of the news, mobile and business sites which have been buzzing about Buzz for a while.

It all looks pretty exciting, but this new frontier of conversational integration is causing no end of controversy. There’s the obvious concern that it’s just a souped-up repeat of the Wave experiment, which rather failed to capture the public’s heart, and not such a great one at that; James has been blogging about the fact that the Silicon Valley-centric company have only integrated it with Android 2.0+ and the iPhone, leaving the rest of us mobile users unsupported.

But the main concern revolves around Google trying to ‘own’ online conversation by routing it through their own property. Now, we can’t be too idealistic about this. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, even the most obscure cabbage-soup-diet forum – these may be perceived as ‘independent’ social venues, but they’re business ventures, concerned with money and market share as much as the big G.

However, whatever the reality, it feels different when you venture out into individual, dedicated spaces, rather than filtering everything you do through one Gmail homepage. People are forever theorising about how to create the perfect single social aggregator, but there is real pleasure and profit in going out to others’ spaces to share rather than dragging everything back into your own. It’s an act of travel that helps us to move beyond our own mental hearths.

And it has become so easy to like, recommend and comment that it’s ever more difficult to filter the quality from the crap. Perhaps a slight element of effort is actually useful, ensuring that we really do want to highlight that bit of content, really do intend to buy that product, really do feel some emotional connection with that brand. As for our increasingly shaky online mental health, a bit of compartmentalisation can be a good thing. When you email, email. When you read, read. When you carefully choose that something is worth recommending, go for it – and therefore know that that recommendation has real weight.

Moreover, the likes of Twitter actively send us away into new spaces via outlinks, helping us collide with truly unexpected discoveries (not the inevitably irrelevant automated ‘recommendations’ Buzz offers from our friends); by posting up the videos and posts linked to in the same window, Buzz discourages us from investigating the original source.

In a similar vein, the option to only share things with selected friends will surely decrease our discoveries through people joined to us by random chance or weak links. Dunbar may tell us we can only maintain 150 ‘stable’ friends, but it has been shown that the unstable ones are the most valuable in widely spreading influential WOM. So Buzz is taking one of the most challenging attributes of Facebook for brands – it’s closed, inward-looking silos – and building them right into the fabric of the platform.

The irony, of course, is that I’ll probably spend much of the week playing with Buzz and pumping lots of social content out there into my network. Google, once again, have done the one thing that most businesses wish they could – stamped some ownership on the way people influence each other and are influenced.

However, this somewhat dystopian vision of Google nailing the model for the single open social network founders on the concept of openness. Google Buzz may look like it’s opening us all up to new WOM, but it it is in danger of locking us into a cycle of existing networks and second-hand discoveries, like stale air conditioning pumping through a password protected room.

I’m feeling a little claustrophobic.

Brought into the world on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 and filed under 1000thoughts, News.