Heather Starr Fiedler may be using Google Buzz, but she’s not sure her neighbor, high school graduating class, or many others will be trying out the new program.With the new Google Buzz, Google, the most popular search engine in the world, is now attempting to enter the cyber world of social networking.Recently Facebook surpassed Yahoo! as the No. 2 most popular website, right behind Google as No. 1. In an attempt to gain some of the ever growing following of Facebook, Google has created Google Buzz to compete with other popular social networking sites.“You have an instant built in friend’s network because it goes through your Gmail,” Digital Media professor Starr Fiedler said. “However, I use my Gmail a lot but it only came up with four friends because it only pulls the friends who also have Gmail. So I’m finding it relatively unusable because I currently don’t have anybody to talk to just yet.”The idea is that members of Google’s Gmail who sign up will automatically be able to add friends who are also using Gmail and give them a head start into the new program, which has many of the same applications as Facebook. Users are able to post status updates, upload photos, as well as import information from users’ Twitter, Picasa or Flickr accounts.“My fear for Google Buzz is people already have what they’re trying to do,” Starr Fiedler said. “In the Web world the first person to get the market generally have the best advantage because people start to develop relationships and friends and a sense of ease with using the software.”Starr Fiedler said she thought if Google had come out with the program a few years ago, the story might be different. While many teens and young adults were the first to jump on the Facebook bandwagon, it is only in the last two or three years that those teens’ moms, uncles and even grandparents have begun to use the popular social site.Almost from the moment Buzz was launched, issues over security measures caused a backlash of concerns from Gmail users, which may be part of the cause for Buzz’s slow start to gain members.“The fact that privacy settings can change and people won’t know about it, especially with the recent Facebook privacy changes, a lot of people don’t want to deal with it,” senior broadcasting student and freelance Web producer Ryan Dennis said.Originally when GMail users signed up for Google Buzz, their contact list was automatically imported into their friends list, which caused concern among its users that business and personal life would become mixed. As a result, Google has changed the privacy settings for the site.Google Buzz is still struggling to gain popularity and grow in members, however.“I haven’t heard anything about Google Buzz,” Laura Smith, a senior public relations major. “I keep hearing about the Wave.”While Starr Fiedler does not see Google Buzz gaining the popularity that Facebook has, she sees potential for Google Wave, which has a market as a social networking site for business partners. Wave would allow for several different participants to edit one document at the same time, eliminating the time-consuming need for e-mailing back and forth edited copies of documents. The program allows people to collaborate in real time, sharing documents, photos, videos, maps, etc., according to the Google Wave preview site.While still in testing with no release date currently set it seems that Google Wave may have a greater market interest than Google Buzz, yet time will tell if Buzz will be anything more than a slight murmur on the social networking radar.