How Google Buzz is Gaining Many Early Followers

Since Google Buzz launched a few months ago, it has had some very impressive early adopters. Mashable and TechCrunch were the first of many larger blogs to launch, followed by many smaller blogs.

But how did Google increase its media coverage and PR enough to launch successfully? Obviously, we can consider Buzz to still be in its beta stages, as there are many steps this feature can take in a new direction. I also have some ideas for Google and would love to see Buzz become a Twitter-like clone in the coming months.

While Buzz may have been seen as just a website to work on, its launch has actually proven quite successful. This is largely due to the fact that most people already use Google accounts. Whether you use Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Wave, or whatever Google has to offer. This makes it easy for people to log into Buzz and try out some of the new features, without having to go through and register a new account.

What made things even easier was Google's new trend coverage. Popular social networking blog Mashable has added a Google Buzz widget, much like the ReTweet and Facebook Share buttons. It allows readers, with a single click, to share any story on Google with all of their Buzz followers. Not only that, but the widget also contains a live count of how many people shared the link via Buzz.

WHERE DOES BUZZ GO?

There are a few directions Google can take with Buzz at this point, most of them moving forward. I can see Buzz becoming a full-fledged news sharing and social networking app, very similar to Twitter but with more options. It would also work well because you can easily link your Gmail address book and contacts.

I would also expect to see an official Google Buzz API released in the next few months. Mashable has set it up so that when you share a link on Buzz, it sends it through Google Reader and tracks the number of times it's been shared that way. It works for now, but I'd like to see an official widget released through Google.

At the end of the day, I'll vouch for Buzz. It has a very promising future, many popular sites and big brands have also created profiles there to increase the impact. Google has released an amazing product so far and I'm excited to see its growth in the coming months.