Internet Bots Find a Home in Google Buzz

A credible report from content analytics network PostRank highlights that Internet bots are posting around 89% of all Google Buzz's content. The percentage is overwhelming, but more curious is how it falls around on categories.

From all the content automatically posted in Google Buzz, Twitter amasses for 62.57%, transforming Google Buzz into a smaller micro-blogging clone. RSS feeds also account for a big portion of the pie with 26.47%, and together with Twitter summing up at 89.04%.

The pie chart seen below pulled from PostRank shows a third category named “Other” with 10.95%. But don't think that the rest of the content on Google Buzz is human generated. As Ilya Grigorik, PostRank expert, points out, “All in all, those two sources (Twitter and feeds) account for almost 90% of the Buzz stream, and even in the remainder there is a long tail of Google Latitude updates, ping.fm, and others. Unfortunately, there just doesn’t seem to be much original and/or human-generated content in Buzz.”

So, in the end, only about 11% of the total Google Buzz content is unique only to it, unfortunately that includes comments as well, leaving even a smaller portion for actual profile posts created in Google Buzz itself.

But to be fair, no one could call Google Buzz a failure just yet, since it's quite a struggle for any service to compete with the multitude of RSS feeds and tweets generated around the web.

That 10% might be small for a normal user, but it includes a percentage that the Google management can be pretty proud of. After including it in other prime Google services, like Reader and Gmail, the company went all out in manufacturing hype for Buzz.

The same problem can be found in Twitter, where a previous study showed that about 76% of its tweets were actual posts and had not originated from bots.