Google Buzzed, Facebook Freaked, MySpace Spaced Out

Been a busy week in Silicon Valley and I wanted to catch you up on what’s going on and provide my spin on it—

Google launched its wannabe Facebook and Twitter killer: Buzz. It takes advantage of the 187 million Gmail users worldwide to jumpstart itself into a “social network”.

Having been in the Web industry since 1994 I’ve seen a lot of attempts by companies to copy others. Bottom line here: Google Buzz is actually pretty good. It will do two things:

1)   Stop Twitter from growing as fast at it wanted to

2)   Stop Facebook from being the only “conversation/friend hub” for over 300 million people online using Facebook

Meanwhile, my friend Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga, the leading social gaming company on Facebook and other sites) agreed to acquire a smaller social gaming company called ‘Serious Business’. Good name for a gaming company. Zynga now counts several hundred million users playing a raft of its games. Some of the more popular are Mafia Wars, Farmville, etc. Zynga has raised more than $200 million in venture capital so far. The irony is Mark founded one of the first social networks, Tribe.net, which never really took off… now Zynga has ridden Facebook’s phenomenal growth to become the leader in social gaming.

Google acquired social search startup Aardvark (vark.com) for $50 million. These are the guys who published a research paper about social search last week. They used to work at Google and now get to return albeit $50 million richer. How’s that for incentive bonus to leave Google, start your own thing, and then sell it to Google? Aardvark lets you ask your friends questions and tries to find the best person to answer it. Sounds kind of annoying to me. Imagine getting asked all these questions by friends? This looks more like a defensive move by Google rather than a killer application they needed. I tend to email friends a question direct rather than try and let a service do that for me without any context.

It was the king of social just 2 years ago but now MySpace is Lost In Space as its CEO was let go after 9 months on the job. Problem? No growth in past 9 months. MySpace seems to have lost its soul, its mission, to me as Facebook stole its thunder and passed it by. In the US grandmas and grandkids use Facebook. MySpace is not that widespread, probably because it looks like a disaster, the design and layouts are a mess. Not sure fired CEO Owen Van Netta is 100% to blame here. MySpace blew its chance in 2007/8 to really clean up the site and make it more useful. Best shot it has now is to try and appeal to kids 12-18 since how many kids want to be on Facebook with their grandmas?