Buzz will begin to roll out in the next 9 – 10 minutes. Full roll out over the next few days. – We are updating, bear with us.
As we expected after yesterday’s breaking news, Google has officially announced a new product called Google Buzz, a real time status and filtering feature for Gmail.
Buzz is how Google wants to bring you the news, and keep the chatter to a minimum.
Google Buzz is a new way to share and discover inside of Gmail. It is akin to a whole new environment inside of Gmail, a “new world” in Google’s words. Buzz has a feature called auto-following (sound familiar?), to let you find a new social graph without all of the work behind actually looking for those people. Buzz will follow all of the people that you already email with, building on your current Gmail contact list.
In a move in support of privacy, Buzz will also allow for private and public sharing of updates.
Buzz will also be integrating into your Gmail inbox directly, in a way that “goes beyond normal email.” Inside of Buzz you can share links, photos, and content from around the web such as data from Twitter, Google Reader and other sources. Other Buzz users will see these, if they can be exported has yet to be explained.
With the auto-follow capability, you will automatically be set up with a feed coming in from your contacts, inside of you Gmail inbox, right away. This will bring Buzz millions of users on day one, creating overnight a heavyweight in social sharing.
Link sharing inside of Buzz has an excellent capability to pull in data (say, images) from links. When you share a link, Buzz will pull in quite a lot of information from that link to make the link more alive for people browsing through. It is similar to what Facebook currently does, but with more power to bring in more total data (and organizes it into a much prettier box).
In good news for the Gmail users, Buzz will be using all of your favorite Gmail shortcuts, saving you time by skipping the learning curve.
A deeper look at inbox integration shows that Buzz will not be an annoyance to even the most casual emailer. Buzz updates will be put directly into your inbox feed. When opened, it acts as a small portal to Buzz, not as a regular email. This is of course, all real time. But to keep the noise down, Buzz will keep updates to a minimum. Whenever your content is commented on, your comments are commented on, or you are sent an @. Sound familiar?
Finally, Google is going to be helping you find what is the best thing to see. Buzz will recommend certain items that you may or may not wish to see. If you tell Buzz that something is dull, the system will learn to keep that sort of update away from you.
When you share an update publicly, it will be put into the Buzz feed, and also onto your Google profile. Google is hitting two companies today: Twitter, and Facebook. These features are a direct move into those two spheres.
Google will be launching a new application at buzz.google.com and Buzz will be accessible at google.com on your web-enabled smartphone (even the iPhone). Google is focusing on making location more significant, asking you instead where you are instead of pushing out your Lat and Long coordinates.
This will let Buzz updates be tagged to a close location. You can update via voice, tag the update to your location, and then by saying “post,” your update will head onto Buzz. All this on Buzz.Google.com, take that app store.
When you select a place inside of Maps, there is a new interface to be used that will be integrating Buzz on the go. This service moves, with speed that is quite remarkable. Of course, if you have weak cell signal in your area, expect some slowdowns.
Want to know what is going on? Buzz will let you know what is being “buzzed” around you. Know what that means? Geotagged updates in the world (think AR in the future) just became a real reality, finally. Buzz’s updates are going to be snapped to locations, and stuck into Google all over the place. Buzz is about to become the new social layer that Google had never had. Get ready, this is going to rock your world.
Buzz will later be an enterprise solution, meaning revenue, not in the Q1 release, but soon. “Watch the space,” says Google. For launch information, please see the top of the post.
Q/A
Yes, they will be integrating with Wave at some point.
No, this does not kill Google Latitude.
They claim that FriendFeed did not inspire them.
From an API perspecitve, both in and out, this will be a very open experience. Will support Pubsubhubbub. APIs will be open very soon.
Your feeds ARE exportable as XML today.
Integrate with Google Voice? Google says well, Buzz is going everywhere like the homepage. They might do it later. Buzz is big and not going away.
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