On 9 February 2010, Google announced that it will include social networking features — called Buzz — in the consumer edition of Gmail. The social elements, which are immediately available, enable users to surface and share photos, videos, links and status updates from multiple social sites. Buzz also includes services for peer and content recommendations and geo-location.

Driven by a commercial need to succeed in the social networking market, Google chose the path of least resistance by adding social elements to Gmail, rather than designing a new application. Established consumer e-mail vendors such as Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft are on a collision course with social networking upstarts like Facebook and Twitter as e-mail becomes more social and social network sites add e-mail services. At stake is control of users' insatiable thirst for social media.

Consumers clearly need a point of aggregation for relevant social activities. Presenting those activities in an e-mail metaphor is the quickest way to adoption. E-mail has some core advantages over other social networking tools:

• It is familiar to users.
• It contains rich troves of data for contact and data mining.
• Its underlying SMTP protocol enables any user on any system to contact any other user.

Google occupies a unique place in the e-mail market as the only vendor that uses a common platform to service business users and consumers. (Buzz will be available to commercial Gmail users by mid-2010.) It also has several other inherent market advantages, such as:

• 175 million active Gmail accounts
• An existing monetization engine
• Rich mobile capabilities
• Ownership of adjacent services such as Maps, Profiles, Reader, GTalk, YouTube, Picasa and Latitude

The danger to Google, however, is that Facebook and Twitter already have enough market momentum to stymie significant Buzz growth.

Gartner expects enterprises will adopt converged e-mail/social networking services far more slowly than consumers, due to corporate concerns over identity, privacy, compliance and security; slower innovation from enterprise suppliers such as Microsoft; and the resistance of e-mail-saturated users. Nevertheless, adoption is inevitable over the next decade.

Organizations:

• Establish guidelines about what business activities are permitted in public e-mail and social site accounts.
• Identify business processes and users that are likely to benefit most from adopting new combinations of collaboration modalities.

• "The Emergence of Fourth-Generation Collaboration Services"— The emerging fourth generation of collaborative services consists of a repackaging of existing services with new use patterns that can help foster innovation and improve inter- and intra-company collaboration. By Matt Cain
• "Predicts 2010: Social Software Is an Enterprise Reality"— Gartner looks at coming trends in the social software and collaboration space and what they mean for business users. By David Mario Smith and others

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