No, I’m not talking about Google being talked up in the news, blogosphere, or twittersphere.  Although I do think Google’s new Buzz concept is newsworthy.  I haven’t really caught any “little b“ buzz about it except within ”big B“ Buzz itself (although there are some news articles to be found about it).  Buzz is Google’s answer to Twitter and Facebook’s news feed.  I’m a longtime GMail user, so I saw it when it rolled out to most users yesterday.  I guess I did see one tweet and one GChat status about it when it apparently soft launched on Tuesday, which had me investigating in advance.

It was interesting yesterday to see people experimenting and wondering what it was all about, through the Buzz interface itself.  It’s apparently not totally intuitive for everyone.  I generally like it and get it though, and I’m not the only one.  There was a lot of people posing questions or concerns through Buzz status updates, and other folk responding back about how they thought things worked and made sense.

So what’s it all about?  Well, there are basic status updates, like Twitter or Facebook.  You can also import your Twitter feed, blog feeds (the first post in the screenshot below is from my blog), and feeds from other sites like Flickr.  Anything that includes an attached or linked photo or video gets it automatically turned into a thumbnail that you can then see larger, inside the page, in a really nice way.  If you clicked the photo in the screenshot below in Buzz, it would expand quickly to fill the browser screen, dismissible with a click.

As a GMail user, you automatically get set up to follow the people you chat or exchange emails with the most.  So you will see all their updates, can comment on them, and will see their comments on your updates and those of others you both follow.  There is then a really nice collapsing organization of related things that GMail users will recognize and appreciate from their email interface.  See how the comments on my blog post above get collapsed.  And then below that, two successive posts from one person get collapsed as well.

You can decide whether your external feeds (like from Twitter or a blog) and individual updates are public, or only go to a particular subset of your contacts.  It is indeed a little complicated.  There are a lot of moving parts.  But I think generally they make it easy to grasp, or at least to have someone else explain easily if you wonder ”out loud“ about it on Buzz itself.  Which as I mentioned I have seen multiple cases of already.

Having played around with it for a few days,  I only see a few significant problems.  One is that the pulling in of external feeds like blogs needs a little tweaking.  When I initially set it up, it pulled my latest blog post as if I had just posted it.  But it was from the day before, and so the content was slightly confusing.  Then I saw it later randomly pull a post from the day before that.  So there’s some issues to be tweaked there.

The other problem is that only GMail users get to use this.  For reasons I won’t speculate on here, most of my friends are gmail users.  So that’s cool for me.  But I think it would be hard to convince a non-GMail user to join just for Buzz.  It’s the same with GChat.  I guess Google is adding more things like this in the hopes that more people will have critical mass peer groups that are all users.  But it will never be universal.  I’m not sure how they get around that.

One big bonus however that comes with anything Google is search.  I can now search for keywords in GMail, and have emails, chats, and buzz posts come back, quickly and easily.  The paranoid will of course speculate about how Google is now increasing its share of your information that it owns, and can serve ads based on.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Social Media, Technology, Web