14 DAY TRIAL // Google hasn't had much luck with the social web. Somehow, its approach so far has failed to provide any meaningful products. But social is the future, at least that's how it looks right now, and, with Facebook becoming stronger every day, Google is worried. After so many misses, it now hopes to score a hit, and is launching Google Buzz, which we got wind of earlier today, a sort of FriendFeed for Gmail with a few Google twists.
The way Google sees it, the social web today is like the plain, old, regular web was 12 years or so, too much noise, too little relevance. Back in 1998, though, a small startup came along and changed that for ever, by organizing everything and surfacing the most important pages and sites. We're talking about Google, obviously, and the company now thinks it can do the same for social web.
Enter Google Buzz. One component of the new service will live inside Gmail. Google hopes its familiarity and popularity will make it easy for people to pick it up and start using it to its full potential in no time. Google is also probably hoping that putting Buzz in front of 180 million or so people will give it a fighting chance and the service will turn out much more popular than anything Google has done in the space before.
The company lists five key features that should make Buzz the center of your online connections. The first feature is auto-following, Buzz will tap into your friends' feeds and updates automatically based on the people you chat to or send emails to the most in Gmail. This will ensure that only the content coming from the people closest to you makes it into the inbox. The second key feature is the Gmail integration which pretty much speaks for itself.
Third, Google wants the best of both worlds, Facebook and Twitter, with public and private sharing. Most items should be available to all, Twitter-style, meaning that Google can index them, but if you just want to share something with your friends you can do that too.
The fourth key feature is inbox integration, any item in Buzz can become a conversation in the way Gmail groups email replies to form a conversation. Finally, there is Recommended Buzz, a feature that automatically surfaces content that may be of interest to you or that may be popular with your friends, but coming from someone you're not directly following yet.
But wait, there's more. Google knows that the mobile web will become increasingly important and is already investing a lot of resources in it. This is why you'll be able to access Google Buzz on the go too on iPhone or Android devices from three separate places, Google's main mobile site, buzz.google.com (which is now live) and from Mobile Maps. It will also figure out your location and you will be able to see the 'Buzz' from nearby rather than from your connections. Photos or posts coming from mobile devices also have location data attached to them.
Google is launching Buzz right now, no letdown like with Wave or Chrome OS, and the site is already live. Google Buzz should be rolling out to Gmail users over the next few days.
