Google Tackles Social Networking with ‘Buzz’
by Dank Kush on Feb.09, 2010, under World News
Google on Tuesday unveiled Google Buzz, a new social networking feature that will be integrated into Gmail and several mobile products.
Google executives framed the effort as a means to avoid all the “noise” currently present on social networking sites and only present the most important bits of information.
Buzz in Gmail will essentially add a “news feed” to the free e-mail service, pulling in information that friends have posted – videos from YouTube, photos from Picasa or Flickr, or updates from Twitter.
Gmail Buzz has five key features, Todd Jackson, product manager for Google Buzz, said during a presentation for the press: auto following; rich, fast sharing experience; public and private sharing; inbox integration; and “just the good stuff.”
The service will start rolling out to all users today, and when it hits your inbox, Google will provide you with an option to sign up for Buzz after sign-in. Accept the terms, and Gmail with automatically follow the 40 people with whom you chat or e-mail most.
“We didn’t want users to have to peck out an entirely new social graph” when joining Buzz, Jackson said.
If there’s someone on that list you don’t want to follow, drop them. You can also follow the public information of people you might not know personally.
In terms of the “rich, fast sharing experience,” Google has added Gmail keyboard shortcuts to Buzz. The company also added a “custom photo viewer” that pops out photos added to the stream, much like they appear in Picasa. Added YouTube photos will also expand for viewing directly inside Buzz.
If you add a link to Buzz, it will pull photos from the Web site in question, much like Facebook’s publisher option. To talk to others, use the @ symbol, like Twitter.
To avoid privacy problems, information added to Buzz can be marked as public or private. “We want to make it possible to publish your thoughts to the world and [get] instantly indexed by Google, but [we] wanted to make it possible to share privately, and switch back and forth,” Jackson said.
How will you know about updates posted to Buzz? Information will be posted in your Gmail inbox, with the Buzz icon separating Buzz info from e-mails. If you open a Buzz and someone comments while it’s open, it will update automatically in real-time.
18 Comments for this entry
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February 11th, 2010 on 8:14 pm
It’s useful being able to find what my family on? Twitter and Facebook are saying about a idea I am searching for without having to waste my time on either social site looking at off topic communication.I love social sites but I really don’t care when you went to the gym. Only getting what I want from my friends is going to make them more valuable to me and keep me from getting sidetracked when I am trying to get real work done.
February 16th, 2010 on 2:45 am
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February 19th, 2010 on 6:42 am
Is Google going to compete with Facebook Buzz?
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February 21st, 2010 on 11:38 pm
Personally I feel that Google Buzz’s submission was a little too early, especially with the recent concern of privacy. I also think that Google’s most likely going down the same future that Windows went through around the era of Windows ME. The past few products and products seem to be less planned and I also feel like rushed to attempt to be a first to market, and or compete with its competitors releases. The privacy issue was was a problem that did not require was a very simple issue to figure out, a very basic QA session would have shown these issues. Do you think Google may have received too much credit last year?
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