On Tuesday, February 9th Google launched Buzz a service for sharing thoughts, conversations and links with your friends. Buzz has been widely described as the search giants latest attempt to take on Twitter and Facebook.
To launch Buzz, Google added it to it’s Gmail service giving it an instant userbase or 38 million people, and the result has been impressive with 160,000 posts and comments on the new service per hour in it’s first few days.
Because Buzz launched as part of Gmail, it already has more users then Twitter, though at present there are far more tweets on Twitter then posts on Buzz. While the service is unlikely to kill off either Twitter or Facebook, it is the most serious new social media contender to appear since Twitter.
I signed up for Buzz myself today, and I was pleased to find a number of museums already on the site, perhaps a sign of how serious our sector takes social media these days.
Will you sign up for Buzz on behalf of your museum? or if you have already, what do you think of the service?
I think I may wait until there is more activity on Buzz before I add the museum to it. At the moment, there are still some issues with it (collapsable comments Google! We need them!), and I haven’t really got my head round it yet. Linking it with Twitter and Facebook is useful so I don’t have yet another thing to check in the morning.
It is nice to see some museums already embracing it and setting the trend! But I think I may wait and see how it develops.
Buzz is only new, yet there’s already a backlash against it, most often dealing with the privacy issues, the fact that it’s opt-out, not opt in (with further privacy implications), and also that it produces a huge stream of updates if you’re connected to a number of people.
It’s great that museums are ready to take advantage of new social networks, rather than being behind the curve, but a good rule of thumb is to decide how you will engage with your audience, and then choose the tool which fits the bill.
As museums are often strapped for resources, I think they should wait for Buzz to bed in a bit, and judge the mood before taking the plunge into ‘another’ social network.