Google Wants Gmail to Take Social Media Market Share

Not content with its monster share of the search engine market, Google got greedy today and unveiled Google Buzz, a revolutionary new social media product that adds a couple of Facebooky things to your Gmail account. Now you won�t have to interact with the hundreds of millions of people on Facebook and Twitter. Gmail will let you share status updates, photos and videos with your entire list of Gmail contacts.

Here are the five main features of Buzz that Google outlined in a press conference today at the company�s Mountain View headquarters.

• Automatic friends lists (friends are added automatically who you have emailed on Gmail)
• �Rich fast sharing� combines sources like Picasa and Twitter into a single feed, and it includes full-sized photo browsing
• Public and private sharing (swap between family and friends)
• Inbox integration (instead of emailing you with updates, like Facebook might, Buzz features emails that update dynamically with all Buzz thread content)
• �Recommended Buzz� puts friend-of-friend content into your stream, even if you�re not acquainted. Recommendations learn over time with your feedback.

The goal of the inflated Gmail application is to keep users in the environment longer, serve them more ads that are highly targeted and get them to click. If social media capabilities do this, the new effort will be a success.