Google's Plan For Buzz

Google's new social media platform for information sharing, Google Buzz, is clearly a response to the runaway growth of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Even more, however, Buzz is about increasing the strength and effectiveness of other Google products, by adding what it gets from observing and organizing this social knowledge.

Buzz, unveiled Tuesday, is a service based in Google's (GOOG - news - people ) Gmail that lets you share status updates and links to other media, like videos, news stories and photos, with friends and colleagues. There are settings to share things with the world or with select groups. There is also a mobile version of the service that seeks to tie activities and updates to the phone user's location.

At first pass, that sounds a bit like sharing links and videos on Facebook, or managing lists of people one follows on Twitter. Google, however, has a very different core business from those other companies'  information organization, particularly on the Web. What Google gets from Buzz is a new means of organization, one that should make Google an even more useful part of life--with the not-incidental effect of improving its ability to sell advertising on its search results and mail.

By watching what people upload or who they follow, for example, Google can move towards a more personalized Web search inside the Gmail application. That would make Gmail a more attractive service to have on all the time, for both communication and Web search.

Likewise, status updates on mobile can add to Google's knowledge about who does what when, which can affect the sorts of buildings and businesses it identifies on Google Maps. If Buzz has broad uptake and collects enough opinions, it could serve as a competitor not just to Facebook and Twitter for status updates, but for review sites like Yelp.

Google plans to make Buzz part of its fast-growing offerings to business as well. In this case, a corporate user might choose to follow the updates from a key manager inside the company, or a corporate division in a related field. Top management can float ideas to generate rapid feedback from highly regarded executives and partners worldwide.

Doubtless, much of the tech punditry will agonize over whether Google is doing anything really new here, or just executing its own version of an existing product. Being a creature of Silicon Valley, it's a big deal to Google to be considered a "thought leader" and not a follower.