• TechCrunch, Wednesday, February 24, 2010 2:04 PM

Despite a serious backlash, Google's Buzz is driving traffic for the search giant. Over the past month, Buzz -- which is part of Gmail but shares links to article and blog posts through Google Reader -- has driven sharing through Google Reader up 35%, according to AddThis. This number only measures sharing through the AddThis button, which is on some 600,000 Web sites, and gives users the option to share content online.

Even with the boost, Google Reader barely registers compared to Twitter and Facebook, which account for 31% and 8% of all sharing via AddThis, respectively. Google Bookmarks does much better than Google Reader, with 5% of all AddThis activity. For what it's worth, the service is beating popular social ranking site Digg, which has 3%.

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