Can Google Buzz Compete With Facebook?
What you saw of Buzz in the Google presentation was just the first step of a major initiative. Google will learn from it, and with time allow more services into buzz, enhance their API offering for developers, and generally make it easier and more convenient to share. So any feature to feature comparison misses the point. Both are living products.
However I think that these 3 metrics are indicative of Buzz's viability as a strong competitor to Facebook.
- Conversion rate of Gmail users to active Buzz users: what percentage of gmail users will eventually start using Buzz actively to share information and read friend feeds. That could be because the sharing is easier, or because gmail is conveniently open in their browsers, or just because Buzz provides a mutual exclusive information feed that is compelling in itself and different from Facebook's.
- Speed of building users' relevant social graphs: Buzz's automatic social graph creation based on your email conversations is an improvement compared to the early days of Facebook (that was also based on email, but without the email frequency and time data points). But it's less comprehensive than Facebook's current social graph that has been based partly on friend suggestions, people you've added manually after meeting in real life, etc. So how quickly and comprehensively Google can rebuild your social graph will be key.
- Ability to increasingly provide valuable integration opportunities for developers: the information flowing in Facebook is increasing coming from third party sites who have chosen to integrate with Connect because of the benefits that it brings to their applications (easier to login, easier to share, word-of-mouth). The interestingness of Buzz's feed depends on the variety of information that is fed into it (and organized by Google's algorithms), and varied information cannot come from Google's sharing tools and the usual suspects (twitter, flickr) only. Buzz will enhance its position if developers start using Buzz's API to postback stories instead of (or in addition to) Facebook Connect.
