Google Buzz – Google’s FaceBook’s Envy?
Posted by Zarwa on February 10th, 2010
Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most.
Buzz is focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi50KlsCBio]
On your phone, Google Buzz is much more than just a small screen version of the desktop experience. Mobile devices add an important component to sharing: location. Posts tagged with geographical information have an extra dimension of context — the answer to the question “where were you when you shared this?” can communicate so much. And when viewed in aggregate, the posts about a particular location can paint an extremely rich picture of that place. Check out the Mobile Blog for more info about all of the ways to use Buzz on your phone, from a new mobile web app to a Buzz layer in Google Maps for mobile.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-kcVDNi6eg]
To be fair, Google Buzz looks quite useful. It borrows the best elements of sites like Twitter (status updates, following), Flickr (a nice photo viewer), Friendfeed (condensed real-time information), Tumblr (encouraging commenting on followed friends), Foursquare and Gowalla (location-aware check-ins via mobile), and Yammer and Socialcast (Horowitz said enterprise support is on the way). Oh, and Facebook (private and public sharing controls, in-line media, etc., etc.).
But Google Buzz also adds some extremely useful tweaks:
- Auto-following the 40 people you email and chat with the most from the time you open the product (which is rolling out to Gmail users over the next 24 hours)
- Really nice email integration — this tops Facebook by far, though it could easily get out of control. Buzz items show up directly in your inbox, as well as in a tab within Gmail. You can open an item to comment directly because it’s a “live object with an open connection to the server that gets updates in all time,” as Jackson described it. @replies a la Twitter can lasso someone directly into a thread.
- Recommendations: Buzz learns over time what you like, and highlights items that friends like and share, while collapsing boring messages at the bottom of the screen.
- Good mobile integration — on Android you can use voice to update, and now Buzz comments show up on locations within Google Maps Mobile and on the map itself via little conversation bubbles on the spot they were made from. Please see the disclosure in my bio about Facebook.
(Source: Google Blog & GigaOm)
