Google Buzz yet another release by the search engine giant in an attempt to get a piece of the large social network and micro blogging platform pie Facebook and Twitter have carved up among themselves. What surprises me about Google Buzz is that Microsoft and Yahoo have implemented such functionality in their own offerings Hotmail and Yahoo Mail some time ago. Although as always Microsoft's marketing department seems far better with its software and OS offerings than anything to do with its email and social networking platforms. Yahoo on the other hand appears more interested in getting people to change their home page to Yahoo (we have all seen the TV ads) but they haven't really given us a reason why (or I have missed the reason). I have tried out Yahoo's offerings and can't quite understand why its better. They have added some nifty little gadgets such as the search pad and they have integrated their own form of "Buzz" (and they will probably cringe when I use that word), in the way of allowing people to see your updated status and enabling you to hook in YouTube, Twitter, Picasa, StumbleUpon (to mention a few) into your status updates.

I suppose Microsoft and Yahoo's approach to the whole subject has been well if we can't beat them we may as well come up with a way to compliment or to work with the flow. In this way Microsoft and Yahoo knew people wanted to keep using these networks and nothing they could offer would sway them from using them, so decided to make all these things easily accessible from their own platforms. "Hey guys you can access all your social networking from one site!"

I think Google have thought of much the same theme however Google has been a lot more vocal about it or maybe its just that we pay a lot more attention when Google says something than if Microsoft or Yahoo says something these days? Google unlike the others has given it a name, Microsoft now a days when they give something a name seem to confuse customers even more. First it was MSN, then Live, then live search became Bing and then there was something called Windows Live services and what happened to hotmail oh is that Windows Live Mail now? Google are very good at keeping what they offer clear and to the point. Googles' web pages are clean and you're not too confused on where to go. Yahoo and Microsoft's Live/hotmail/MSN (what ever they call it now). Is very much hidden away or not that easy to find on their busy and very advertising focused websites. I remember thinking a while back I would like to try out Microsoft's new search they kept on talking about it but I couldn't figure out what site to go to to find it. I eventually found it under www.live.com, however Microsoft rebranded it yet again and now are asking people who visit their home page to change it to www.bing.com. Maybe Microsoft would be more successful with their offerings which are pretty good if they were more consistent and didn't keep on changing their minds on what they were going to call themselves. Few people realise that they can access Microsoft's online version of Office (albeit in Beta) from their accounts as you can with Google Docs.

My friend Owen Twittered this interesting article on the BBC web site about how social networks are the "new e-mail". This is a subject I have found pretty interesting, partly because every day of my life since the Internet started to get popular I have been spammed excessively.

I have 3 personal email accounts which I am not very good at checking. The only email account that gets my full attention is my work email account. My work emails get sorted into what needs my immediate attention and items that are mildly interesting that I will file away and most probably forget about. There may be a few social contacts which I will probably set myself a reminder to deal with later in Outlook. To me email has become a real chore for every email account you have you need to sort the noise from your real contacts. It has become such an issue that sometimes I give up all together on my personal email account and sit down maybe once a week separating adverts, circulars and spam from genuine friends emailing me. In the old days email was not like this, when you received an email it was an exciting occasion, someone genuinely wanted to contact you. Email used to feel the same as receiving a hand written letter in the post from a friend, but now I find 1 out of 10 emails is usually spam.

Social networks help you separate spam from friend pretty easily. You usually have the option to not receive messages from people who are not in your social network and hence making your social messages and alerts easier to take in. The only problem I have found with networks such as Facebook is the excessive amounts of forwards and invitations to join certain groups or install certain applications. Without thinking about it I installed several Facebook applications just because friends forwarded them to me. I even ended up on a dating Facebook application, which I had no intention of joining and had great difficulty removing myself from. After awhile I started to find social networks just as tiring it was yet another "thing" that needed attention and soon my Facebook account started to become just as tedious to maintain. I found that the best way for people to get my attention or to get me to respond to a social events was via MSN Messenger, phone or actually meeting me and asking if I was attending something. Messenger is spontaneous and gets results. Then someone introduced me to Twitter and from there things started to change.

Twitter didn't demand the high maintenance of a social network and the noise created by spam in an email account was easily avoidable. Twitter kept things simple, you post a message in Twitter it can be anything you want and people can respond. If people start spamming you, you remove them from the list of people you follow on Twitter. Twitter is like a cross between blogging, MSN messenger and social interaction for me. Its also a great platform to put a question to the world and get a response from an expert in almost seconds. This got me thinking, if you keep things simple and they don't demand a great amount of your time, people will stay with it. It was almost as though traditional email should have had this built in. You can only send me emails once I accept your email account is allowed to send me messages which has been attempted before but requires you pay a subscription fee. I don't think social networks are the new email 2.0 I just think they are yet another way of communicating with each other. Each of these communication methods has its place.

I just have too much information to take in every day. At work I have about 50-100 e-mail's a day to cope with, then I have a constant feed of RSS traffic from just too many blogs coming into my RSS reader, Facebook traffic comes in at a constant stream and then my ISP email account and my GMail account never end.

You would just say I could turn off the RSS reader? The problem is the current project I am working on uses a Wiki for everything so every time people make changes or tag things for your attention my RSS reader goes nuts bringing in traffic. My work email account I have had for such a long time that I get all kinds of spam now and company emails going back and forth. As it takes me so long to read everything I just glance at it and use the Outlook flagging tool to mark it as important to read later. I don't think I could cope with another social network or information source and ironically enough when I want to get any work done at work I actually turn off all of these information sources. Its funny that all these information sources that are supposed to be such a "boost" and help in the workplace are actually a hindrance. Every hour at work I will start up Outlook and begin deleting the messages that are not important. Another interrupter at work is MSN messenger which we use for communicating across sites, I will also turn this off when I need to get work done and turn it on every now and again if I need to bother a colleague for help.

I realise a lot of organisations have blocked many of these "tools" and social networks on their firewalls to stop their staff from being distracted, I like to think I am good at self policing myself, but I realise why companies do this. Sometimes people just can't help themselves and I have friends who admit they have a weakness not being able to leave Facebook, Beebo or what ever social network they belong too alone while at work. I personally never use social networks while at work, as I know how distracting they are. Although one of things I say to people is while you are using them look at the clock on your PC when you first start and write it down. Then look at it again every now and again, you'll be quite amazed by how 2 minutes turns into 30minutes.