Google Buzz was launched earlier this year in February with high expectations and was even being touted as a serious potential competitor to Twitter. Its button appeared on Mashable which is the worlds largest social media blog. Its leverage was expected to be massive driven by the huge installed base of Gmail users with an interface similar to Twitter. 
The Chikita research network measured the number of searches for “Google Buzz” on February 9 at about 1,500 searches which was 15 times more than the the number of searches for Twitter. It received over 9 million comments and posts on social media, peaking at 160,000 per hour during the launch.
Over a month later the number of searches had dropped to one per day whereas Twitter Google searches had remained steady at an average of 87 per day.
So where are we now 8 months later?
Mashable has removed the Buzz button and replaced it with a Digg button (see how long that lasts) and the Facebook share and the Twitter retweet button haven’t moved.
I also took the term “Google Buzz” and Twitter and using the Google Insights tool I found that the decline is almost complete with Twitter showing an increased average over the past thirty days of ninety average searches per day but Google Buzz almost without a pulse at zero. (see below)
So Twitter has continued to grow adding over 60 million users in the last seven months from a user base of only 3 million two years ago.
Twitters success is based on its simplicity. Google’s social media ventures seem to over complicate things and despite its deep pockets it is still struggling to get traction in social networking and is certainly starting to look over its shoulder at Facebook.
So is Google Buzz about to become extinct just like Google Wave?
Image by Topgold
