Google has finally broken into the world of social networking. Not to say they did not have social networking sites before. Their social networking sites such as Orkut or OpenSocial were not such a hit within the online social networking community. With these sites, they were following the same mold of Facebook and Twitter who fan base started from scratch and then grew with popularity.

What Google have now done is simply a stroke of genius. They have embedded Google buzz into their Gmail service. As a result, the fan base is already existent and studies show is growing at an average 176 million visitors each month. Although Google buzz is new, its impact is huge as users of the service gave access to all the gadgets of the Gmail service including streaming of status updates, links, videos and buzzes. To fathom the impact of Google Buzz, one would have to imagine cramming Twitter, Yammer, Yelp, Facebook and Foursquare into one social network.

Uses of Google Buzz in Education

The open source approach that Google has adopted in the development of Google Buzz has increased the excitement level in the secondary application development market. The flexibility of Google Buzz has brought with it many useful applications outside of the direct social networking world. After close examination, we have seen where Google Buzz has many ways in which it can be incorporated into the educational system. Some of these methods include:

• Users of Google Buzz are able to conduct Facebook and twitter like conversations. Students can use this forum to communicate easily with their peers without having to sign into another social networking site while checking their Google mail. They can even throw open questions much like a Facebook status message but with a more interactive flavor.

• Being embedded into Google Gmail service, teachers can easily conduct research on any topic without losing sight of the happenings of fellow teachers and linked students.
• With Google Buzz, teachers are now able to maintain a closer relationship with their online students.Teachers can now easily with one application use their Gmail embedded Google Buzz to disseminate and collect assignments and then make immediate comments either generally or to specific students. This will certainly reduce the hard copy paper work at school, as all messages can be easily stored on request.
• Unlike Twitter, with Google teachers are able to select who can see particular buzz they upload. Therefore, if they want to address only a part of the class you can do so using Google buzz without fear of general exposure.
• Google buzz has brought with it an easier method of promoting ideas or items to the public. This is a great opportunity for research doctors at universities to promote their ideas. What Google has done is to give users of the Google buzz the ability to make public posts that are included into their general Google search engine. As a result, professors only have to include keywords that will attract traffic and direct this traffic to your post.