360DigitalInfluence

This past winter was one the snowiest on record in the Lake Tahoe region of California, which was great for skiing but horrible for keeping cars on the road. I skied 28 days in a four months with a full time job in San Francisco — basically, every Friday night I was driving up to Tahoe in a blizzard.  And every Friday night I was glued to Google Buzz for real time updates about accidents and road closures — the results came in about a half hour to an hour before California Highways did. I also was checking for backroads ways around these road closures. Google Buzz saved anywhere from 2 to 12 hours of time each weekend; that’s a lot of precious hours on the snow when you add that up across a ski season.

Each time I used the mobile app portion of Google Buzz on Google Maps, I shared an experience with people normally separated by their cars. Google Buzz, to be just a bit sentimental, brought us together. And we weren’t talking about what we ate for lunch or some random Internet meme but about something actually — sorry Triffle — useful.

Talking to My IRL Friend
When Buzz launched February 9th of this year, the first time I saw it was in my Gmail. After playing around with it, I buzzed about just coming back from a ski trip – surprise! – and within 5 minutes, my almost always social-media-quiet friend imed me via Buzz to ask how it was. Google Buzz connected me not just with chance Internet users but with my closest friends.

Built off of Gmail contacts, your Google Buzz followers were people you actually communicated with rather than middle and high school friends who you engage with from time to time on Facebook. My Google Buzz friends are the friends to whom my lunch choice might actually mean something because they might have even been there.

How We Can Actually Use It
Some of the most social media savvy content providers have started Buzz channels; for example Tech Crunch and the Huffington Post have Google Buzz profiles they link to on their homepages and include Google Buzz share-to-social buttons on content. Both companies have set up their Buzz profiles using RSS and receive additional user engagement via the feed for not much effort. Still, Twitter and Facebook are still greater traffic and WOM drivers — but remember, it’s only been 6 months since the product launched.

And let’s not forget Google Buzz’ Google map integration: Imagine generating geo-specific Buzz around an event that local Buzz users could see in real time via their mobile devices.

New Firehouse API
Last month, Google launched a new “firehouse” API, which gives access to real time Google Buzz public posts, similar to how Twitter is searchable through real time search engines now. OneRiot and Collecta are among the first subscribes, and for now, access to the service seems to be free; full access to Twitter’s real time results, dubbed the “firehouse”, is a paid for subscription. Google Buzz’s firehouse API will add a new dimension of virility to Google Buzz in addition to increasing SEO for content as it spreads across the Internet. Google is certainly hoping it will increase Buzz’s user base.

And I hope so too. I don’t think my ski season in Tahoe will be quite the same without real time road updates from fellow Google Buzzers.