This week, one of my Friends asked for a comparison between Google Wave and Google Buzz.

I happily obliged, with this short assessment:

Twitter for this ... Buzz for that ... etc etc

A little more in-depth on the different tools for different use cases after the break:

Twitter

The nice thing about Twitter is that you can leave your client (most Twitterati prefer TweetDeck) running happily in the background. Then every couple of hours, dip in and see if there are any interesting posts in your Twitter streams, check up on some trending topics, and see what your custom searches have come up with.

Twitter is all about viral memes. In my Twitter stream these last few weeks, I’ve noticed Bruneians loving to talk about Burgers. One Twitter use starts talking about Burgers, soon the whole community is craving Burgers. Funny and cool.

The advantage of Twitter is the 140-character limitation. To some this is a boon, to others a limitation. But limiting the messages to 140-characters prevents those wall-of-text “Too Long; Didn’t Read” (TLDR) posts that some are prone to do. The 140-character limitation means that Tweets fit nicely within an SMS (160-characters), and some users even prefer to interact with Twitter via SMS. For one Journalist, this helped him bust out of jail in Egypt.

Google Buzz

The magic about Buzz is the integration with GMail. And with a supported smartphone (iPhone and Android platforms), geo-location tags, your Buzz updates can even be location aware.

Because remember … Google was founded to tackle one of the most complex questions in modern computing. How do we provide meaningful search results of Internet data? The Internet is a nightmare to parse, index and search because it’s a gigantic mess of markup, data, graphics and linguistics.

But check out what Buzz does! Buzz adds context to user generated content (UGC). UGC is where it’s. Read through the #brunei search on Twitter and you’ll see that there’s plenty of user generated content being used, edited and shared around.

With the advances in Artificial Intelligence and the Google Buzz overlay over Google Maps, I think where we are really going to see Buzz shine through will be searching for location-specific and search-specific UGC, embedded into normal Google internet searches

Google Wave

Wave is definately a close cousin of Buzz, but it’s nothing like it at all. Wave is more intended for real-time communication. You can see what your colleagues are typing as they type it. And the chat history is preserved between sessions, for all to see. So this is a great way to “share a story”, or even “develop a story” between multiple participants.

One use case I can see is doing a peer review on a piece of technical documentation. Say you wanted to review someone’s white paper. You’d schedule up an online Google Wave meeting, prepare in advance, and use the Wave to document your preparation notes. Then on the actual meeting, you’d use the Wave to list our issues to be addressed etc while the both of you are switching to and from the chat client and the actual document being reviewed.

Facebook

These days, Facebook is more than “just” a social networking tool. Facebook has morphed into an application development platform, that enables developers to exploit the “social graph”. What the heck is a “social graph”?

It’s that friend-of-a-friend, 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon, spider diagram graph that connects us all to one another. Killer apps for Facebook are those that leverage the connections between people across the global social graph.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is kind of like a “Facebook for Professionals”. Lots of good features – the Answers section is a great way to develop a brand name for yourself on the Internet by becoming a subject matter expert. And getting  positive feedback from your clients on your LinkedIn page can be a good way to show your excellence in client service when developing your client base.

And hey, the PotUSA is on LinkedIn too.

The Bottom Line

So which tool should one use for which use case?

Twitter – I use this to keep in touch with loose acquaintances, to get to know other Twitterati better, and to keep up to date with other bloggers who share the same interests as I do. I also cross-post my Twitter feed into Buzz and Facebook. My Blog automatically posts into Twitter and Facebook too. Twitter is excellent for mass promotions and spreading memes, and that is just what I use it for.

Google Buzz / Google Wave – I use this to communicate, collaborate and share things with people I socialise with, with my family and my friends. I wouldn’t necessarily want to add all my blog readers to my Google Buzz! Because that would get unmanageable very quickly.

Facebook – Only for people who I correspond with regularly over the Internet and for people who I’ve met in real life. Because Facebook has lots of personal info (where you went on holiday, who your friends are, etc etc) you may want to keep your Facebook circle fairly tight. On the other hand, the Twitter stream is (for most users) a public stream.

LinkedIn – For those times when you want to run a background check on a new business contact. Ah Mr So-and-So … lemme just see if I’m connected to him via LinkedIn. And lets see what his profile says about him.

Related posts:

1. Google’s Nexus One smartphone – not your ordinary innovation Why Google's Nexus One isn't all just about technological innovation,...