Have you been buzzing recently? No, I don’t mean buzzed in the sense of alcohol, but yet another verb brought to you via the inspiration of “Googling.” If you haven’t caught the gist, then go grab a Diet Coke and have a look at Google Buzz. Google’s most notable product of recent times lets you take drunk dialing to the next level — by allowing you to post status updates to multiple sites from a single location.
Before discussing the multiple site capabilities, I’ll just mention the tiny fact that when you sign up with Google Buzz, the company automatically allows people in your address book — or even those you email – to view your updates.
Essentially, Google Buzz melds together work with fun.
But over the past few days the tech world has been buzzing with controversy over Google’s new service.
From investigations by the Federal Trade Commission to a review from the Canadian Privacy Comissioner’s office and even a class-action lawsuit, all three focus heavily on the alleged privacy violations of Google Buzz.
Overall, the feature set of Google Buzz has been very dynamic. The rollout has been happening to the approximate 175 million worldwide users of Gmail, according to Comscore.
In a nutshell, Google Buzz can be thought of as the Facebook status, or Twitter’s tweet components, on steroids. The service allows you to post images, send messages to other members in your social network, post messages of any length of your choosing and view data from multiple social networks in one location. Google’s service is heavily integrated into your Gmail account, which may or may not be an issue, depending on your tolerance for combining email with social networking.
While Buzz supports integration into your Twitter, blog, Flickr, Google Chat, and Google Reader accounts, Facebook is currently not supported. This certainly makes Buzz less appealing to many individuals. There are also plenty of quirks that make Buzz fairly difficult to use. From issues of differentiating public and private messages, automatically adding people you email to your Buzz lists, and problems with sorting messages, the service still needs time to improve.
Despite the many downsides, there is a feature of Google Buzz where the odds favor Google becoming a leader. In this case, it is location based networking and geotagging, which shows your current location on a map for your friends to see (via your phones GPS), or just simply sending a blurb message as a status update. Currently, Foursquare.com has been a key player in that field. However, Google has potential to take the lead, as Google has a larger user set than Foursquare.
Currently Google Buzz mobile is only available for the Android 2.0 and the iPhone. Other smart phones will likely be supported as time progresses.
