Google Buzz and Friending

I have found this week task quite interesting and different from the usual Blog Post.  I have been required to make a research on two topics (“Google Buzz” and “Friending”), and to post my findings on a wiki tool called wikidot.  Wikidot enables us to create a site to publish and share contents. This is nothing new, but what I liked about it is that I could have the experience of posting my own definitions on a wiki tool. I specially loved to go throughout the formatting part. I have spent more time on formatting rather than on the content itself. I felt like I was posting at Wikipedia. The disappointment part was that I could not retrieve my post just making a search on the site. Wherever search made, the result was a post regarding ‘Open Office’. I guess this is just a bug on the system.

One of my research topics was about Google Buzz. You can have a look at my wiki on the link provided. Basically Buzz is just an attempt by Google to catch up in the social networking technology, by merging your Google account with some selected social network sites. The good side is whatever tool a follower of you have used, the message would go straight into your inbox account, so you wouldn’t need  to login into multiple accounts to check for messages. After this research, I got curious to know statistic about how many users have been using the service, but I couldn’t find anything recent regarding it. The only relevant information I could retrieve was from a blog entry made by Ben Parr, back dated to February 2010, reporting that Google Buzz had surpassed 9 million post comments in just few days of service. I found quite impressive, but apparently Google do not want to share Buzz user statistics.

My second topic was regarding Friending. I have to say that I found quite disappointing to research on this topic. I just couldn’t find enough sources. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand the concepts of Friending, but from what I could retrieve, Friending is all about making new meaningful connections on the social world, no matter if those connections are with a friend or with an organisation. Some of the concepts related to business I took from a great book, that I read few months ago, called Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way we Live and Do Business. This book explains the Social Media phenomenon. It gives insight on how social media is revolutionizing, causing a “power shift “. Now the consumer has the same voice as a brand, so messages are no longer controllable by the institutions. A good example of this power shift happening now in some Arabic countries. The people are talking to each other throughout social networks. They are organising themselves to make a change; a revolution!!! Most of London student protests were also organised in Social Medias. Anyway, Socialnomics is a recommended reading, especially if you are interested to know the impact of Social Media in our society.

My both topics had been checked using TurnitIn, which had return 13% on the originality.