11 Feb 2010 by Fiona No Comments

Yesterday saw Google launch its own social networking site, Buzz, against established rivals Facebook and Twitter – but is there now too much choice for where people visit to catch-up with their friends?

Google Buzz allows users to share personal updates, photos and videos. Anyone using the existing email service, Gmail, will automatically be able to use the service, meaning the network already has hundreds of millions of people.

Whilst a bold move on Google’s part, the industry reaction seems to be that it will never be able to compete with the likes of Twitter and Facebook as it doesn’t offer anything over and above the existing capabilities of these platforms.

One major concern that has been raised is around the privacy of the service. In order to quickly populate your list of friends, Buzz automatically follows other Buzz users that you frequently communicate with through Google’s other services such as GMail and Google Talk. While this automatically gives you a populated list of people to follow and allows your most common contacts to see your status update, it also makes your Buzz friends list public by default.

But being so new only time will tell whether Google Buzz will really take off.

If you’re signed up and are loving/hating the service let us know your thoughts.