clintonjeff/Clinton Jeff
College life: the studying, the papers, the finals (eek!), make it tough to find the time to keep up with old friends (let alone new ones!) across the oh-so many social networks. Even before you ever get to college, those campus visits, financial aid forms, and college applications are enough to keep you busy!
Google Buzz, very recently unveiled by Google (we’re talking February 9, 2010), wants to be your one stop shop: upload your photos, videos, and your status all from one place. We’ve all got friends who use Facebook or MySpace but don’t Twitter, who favor Flickr over Photobucket – and vice versa. Instead of signing into all these separate social accounts Google Buzz aims to replace them all, so you have one place to keep track of everything – and that’s the big difference.
Instead of logging in to a bunch of different sites, you simply log in to your Gmail account, hit up Google Buzz, and tweet, upload, and comment away – after carefully setting privacy settings, of course. When a friend responds, instant update alerts are sent straight to your inbox, where all of your Gmail contacts have been automatically imported. You can spend less time finding “friends” and more time hitting the books! While many social networking sites connect: Facebook doesn’t.
You’ve probably seen your Facebook friends grumbling over recent layout changes, but — do you really think they’d ditch their FarmVille or Mafia Wars gaming apps for Google Buzz (especially with rumors of Facebook email in the future)? Facebook was made for college students by college students.
We’ve played around with it and, oh yeah — it’s fun! But, then again, new toys are always fun. We’ll see if it actually sticks. Google Buzz might have potential: it’s all in one place (even on the iPhone and Android) with a familiar layout (um, hello Facebook!). But, after the failure of Google Wave…we’ll just have to wait and see.
What do you think? Does Google Buzz have everything you need in order to keep in touch when you head off to college? Does it entice you to make the Gmail switch (if you haven’t already)?
