Cloud Talk

Unlike the launch of Google Wave last year, Google released Buzz with significantly less fanfare but with a lot more real promise. Buzz is yet another attempt by Google to add a social component to their varied product portfolio.

Let's face it - for a company that does so many things well, getting a legitimate foothold in the social networking arena has been elusive. Google Wave was a non-starter but the early returns on Buzz look good. Here's my quick view on why Buzz will succeed where Wave didn't

1. Buzz is augmenting, rather than reinventing your communication experience. The most important thing about Buzz is what it's NOT trying to do. Buzz isn't an attempt to reinvent email - instead it augments Gmail with the social experience. It also leverages email in a very natural and intuitive way in building your social network and sharing content. Make no mistake about it - this is a huge advantage in Google making up lost ground on Facebook.

2. Buzz is tackling a focused "problem space". It's about social networking, not about melding various communication modes. Google Wave suffered from the "swiss army knife" effect - equal parts of IM, email, document collaboration and social networking. It was a positioning nightmare - not many understood it, few used it and almost no one could define it succinctly.

3. Buzz is inherently mobile enabled. Unlike many social networks that "bolted on" mobility or enabled mobile access, Buzz is the first to really take advantage of mobility from the start, leveraging features like geo-location and blending it with search. For a good synopsis of the user experience on a mobile phone, check out Matt Buchanan's post on Gizmodo.

4. Real compelling user experience. Here's the real secret of cloud computing - the battle isn't fought on the back end services. Yes, I know - dynamic capacity, scale and time to deployment are all the reasons why customers buy into cloud computing but the way vendors differentiate themselves is on the basis of the user experience. And, from what I can tell, there's a lot about the Buzz UX that really works - it's real easy to share content - a little like Friendfeed meets Gmail.

Maybe the slightly less fanfare but open release with Buzz is what really makes it get traction in the end. Google Wave's big overhyped launch with the "shroud of mystery", qualified beta was really the antithesis of successful Google product launches. It's nice to see Google get it right with Buzz.