Google Buzz

When I first heard about this service, it seemed like the point was that now all of the status updates, RSS-loaded posts from blogs, and photos from people I barely ever talk to -- in other words, the vast majority of my Facebook feed -- can show up in my email inbox? What a nightmare -- I'd sooner have the "Everyone" feed from RateItAll show up as emails in my inbox. I played around with this today and it seems that it's a separate tab in Gmail that contains an activity stream, ala Friendfeed, Twitter, Facebook, etc. People are suggesting that these messages can actually show up in my email inbox itself, but I haven't seen that happen yet. I hope it doesn't! I'd rather use email for actual email. It seems like a lot of work for me to set up another list of people to follow. I don't really want to spend time to do that. I don't correspond via email with most of the people on Facebook and Twitter that I'd care to read about, so Buzz has no idea about my existing social graph. S... Read more

What Buzz means is that it is treating your email client as a social network platform and the people you email the most will be the ones who you connect with automatically using Buzz. You can share whatever you want to with either everyone (the world) or just people on your contacts list and works with existing platforms such as Twitter, Flickr and Google Reader. When you use this from your mobile phone you can also use Geo-location services to see what Buzz's are near your current location which brings a similar location-aware social networking feel as programs such Tweetie do for Twitter. It's also possible to comment and "like" people's Buzz's similar to how you can do this with RSS items in Google Reader. It also expands out to having a custom layer for Google Maps and appearing as a shortcut on all your Google pages though at present you can only use the full range of features on the iPhone and Android phones. Unfortunately I've not yet been able to try this in Gmail as I'm not ... Read more

Google Buzz is Google's latest social media effort, and tries to make it easy to share content (links, photos, your location) with your friends or with the world at large. It combines elements of Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Foursquare. What's notable about it off the bat is that Google is dropping Buzz into everybody's Gmail accounts, taking it from 0 to millions of users over night. It's a pretty good effort. But here are the things I think they did wrong: - No vanity URLs instead of google.com/ltrain I get google.com/profiles/ltrain. A small point but a significant one, and a clear competitive disadvantage to services like Twitter and Facebook which give you /yourname. - Finding people to follow is way harder than it should be. I don't send from my personal gmail account that often, so Google's autofollow recommendations are way off. And why can't I follow people from my contacts list as opposed to making me dig up their Google profile? - The location / check-in aspe... Read more

I'll withhold my review until I've used it a little more, but here's a pro-tip for anyone who opts into Buzz and uses gmail on a phone or a desktop mail client. The inbox integration has the potential to become a nightmare. To fix this, set up a filter that sends all buzz messages to a folder (skipping your inbox): 1. select a buzz message in your inbox in gmail's web client. 2. Click on the More Options drop-down and select filter messages like these 3. In the subject field in the filter setup menu that appears, type Buzz: 4. Test the filter (unfortunately gmail currently ignores punctuation, so if anyone uses the word buzz in their subject line, these messages will also have the filter applied to them. Fortunately it's an uncommon word). 5. Click next step 6. Check the following options: Skip the Inbox (Archive it), apply the label (create a new one called google buzz or something) 7. check the little box marked: Also apply filter to ## conversations below. and click on the create... Read more