Google may be getting lots of positive buzz for Buzz, but arch rivals Yahoo and Microsoft are dismissing the new service — which aims to turn Gmail into a communications hub where users can share updates and watch what others are doing around the web, a la Facebook — as lame catch-up ball.

Yahoo public relations wrote to "update" reporters on Yahoo Updates, just an hour after Google's announcement:

It’s been almost a year and a half since Yahoo! first launched Yahoo! Updates – a social feature that lets people share their status, content and online activities and stay connected to what their friends and family are doing on Yahoo! and across the Web [...] There are now more than 200 Yahoo! and third-party sites that feed into Yahoo! Updates – like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp and Yahoo! Buzz – allowing people to see and share updates such as when they’ve uploaded photos, changed their status, buzzed up a news story or posted a new restaurant review, all from Yahoo! Additionally, Yahoo! recently announced an expanded integration with Facebook that will allow people to connect with Facebook friends on Yahoo! and share Yahoo! content with Facebook friends as well.

You'll note that Yahoo already has a product called Buzz – its Digg-like social news service that's been around for nearly two years. A Google spokeswoman said Buzz is just a generic term, and that Yahoo had no trademark on its name, so it shouldn't be a problem.

That's not likely a sentiment being shared in Sunnyvale, where Yahoo is struggling to redefine its place in the world of online media and technology. The company just largely tilted towards the media side of that equation by outsourcing its search operations to Microsoft – after failing to keep up with Google's ad, search and online software innovation. Watching that rival brazenly use one of their own product names has got to feel like Google's got no sense of fair play.

And while Buzz is really intended to deflate Facebook, Microsoft quickly took harsh shots at the product – calling it both late and unnecessary.

"Busy people don't want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation," Microsoft said Tuesday. "We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008."

The protests are a bit too much. Microsoft isn't a leader in the social world, despite its investments in Facebook.

Its online services remain also-rans in the market – Hotmail's heyday was in the late 1990s, and its current stellar Maps product relies on users installing Silverlight – a Microsoft-centric browser plug-in. Meanwhile, Bing is still playing catch-up to Google dominant search engine.

It's way too early to tell if Google's Buzz will catch on and actually develop into a compelling alternative to Facebook – or even better, turn into a standard, like e-mail, that lets people do social networking without having to be a member of any site. It might just go the way of Google's previous social efforts like Orkut, and become a footnote on the company's Wikipedia entry.

But clearly, Microsoft and Yahoo haven't succeeded here, either. Otherwise, there would be no need to remind tech reporters that they tried this first.

The true target – Facebook, the insular social networking site that wants to keep users and their info on its own site – made no public statements Tuesday. But you can be certain the halls of Facebook were buzzing with the news.

Art: Edgeworks

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