The Buzz about Buzz

Google's buzz

Yesterday, Google made another move in the direction of owning the Internet with their announcement about Buzz, their new social platform built into GMail.

This platform leverages your existing social graph that you have built up while using GMail. Much the same as it remembers the contact information of people you email often with, it will add these people as your friends in Buzz. You can also direct people to your Google profile, which will allow them to follow you on Buzz.

There are also location based features built in. You can Buzz from your iPhone or Android phone (running 2.0), and it will tag your location.

It feels a lot like FriendFeed to me, which was a place to aggregate content and comment on or discuss things. It is akin to a long form of Twitter, with comments and likes similar to Facebook. Facebook recently purchased FriendFeed, and some think that Buzz is because of that.

Currently, Buzz is mostly early adopters talking about how cool it is. It will be interesting to see over the next month which direction it will take: will it be the geeky-cool place for the tech people to chat (like Friendfeed), or will it be a platform everyone can leverage (like Twitter).

Buzz seems to be best for times when you want to create more long-form content, yet you don’t want to do it as a blog post (either it doesn’t fit, is not valuable enough, or it is directed at people). You can direct your messages to people while still having them be public. It is the interesting niche between a blog, Twitter, and chat.

It can also import content from other sites, such as Twitter, Flickr, and blogs.

It is currently being rolled out to everyone, and should be  active completely by early next week.

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Mitchell HislopMitchell Hislop

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