By now, half the planet knows that yesterday evening Google has announced a new service, called Buzz. I wanted to cover it but unfortunately there are only 24 hours in a day and this blogger went to bed instead.
Enough personal stuff. Now that the buzz about Google Buzz is a bit over, time to take a look at it. What does Google Buzz do?
Basically, it allows you to follow the updates of the people that you ‘follow’ in your GMail account and respond to them. But there’s more.
Buzz: conversations and of course mobile
There is a bit of Facebook and Twitter timeline going on there.
According to the folks at Google, however, the integration with GMail makes Buzz more conversation-oriented.
There are plenty of features. You can add pictures and video, there is auto-following, there is public and private sharing, etc.
And of course there’s a lot of mobile going on also. I guess I shouldn’t mention Android and Google’s mobile strategy here?
Twitter updates can appear in Google Buzz but not the other way around (yet).
GMail contacts and mail/chat history
You know that many social tools offer you the possibility to invite your GMail contacts or see which GMail contacts already use the service you’re signing up for.
That’s kind of handy. However, if GMail is not your main email environment (as it is with me) but more an account to receive newsletters or to log-on to other Google services (like Google Analytics and all the others), that’s not handy at all.
Fortunately there always are solutions. If you use LinkedIn, for example, you can export all your contacts in a .CSV file and then import them into your GMail contacts.
Why is this important? Well, of course because Google Buzz revolves around the GMail platform. Buzz also proposes to add friends, based on, for example, your Google chat history.
As you know, Google is all about open applications and open source. So developers can start using the API now to integrate Buzz in their apps.
Google Buzz: soon coming to a GMail account near you
Among the apps that Google Buzz already supports, there are of course Google-owned tools such as Google Reader, YouTube, Picasa and Blogger.
Flickr and Twitter are supported to. I just checked and Buzz is not in my GMail environment yet. What I’m most interested in is how Buzz handles the possibilities to share with friends only or with ‘the world’. Is there anything in between too? Remember yesterday’s release about Pip.io.
I invite you to check out the YouTube video below (there are plenty more about Buzz on YouTube and they’re very promising) and I guess there will be some testing to do. If you already use GMail you should see Google Buzz appear in the webmail environment soon.
If anyone out there already could test drive it, please shoot and comment away.
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