Feeling overwhelmed by the bevy of social networking services? Google wants to help — by adding one to the list. On Tuesday the company unveiled Google Buzz, another way for people to tell other people what they’re doing, thinking and feeling.
As expected, the Google Buzz service is tied to Gmail and lets any Gmail user write status updates that other users can see. If you create a Google profile page, your posts will go out to the full Web too.
Google Buzz also lets people post links, YouTube videos and photos from Google’s Picasa service. At launch, Google will let people link Buzz to their Flickr and Twitter accounts as well. A similar courtesy has yet to be extended to Facebook.
People will find the Google Buzz notes right in their Gmail in-boxes, where they’re marked with a special Buzz icon that looks like a cartoon text bubble filled with Google’s signature primary colors. The comments that follow an update, also known as a Buzz, are grouped in a similar fashion to the way Gmail handles a thread of messages.
There are some added smarts as well. For example, Buzz will direct you to follow status updates from the people that you most frequently e-mail and chat with (if you use Google’s chat service). In addition, Google will suppress status updates judged to be boring because they have, say, just a couple of words or a lack of comments. Meanwhile, Google will recommend a possible Buzz of interest if a couple of your friends have been commenting on it.
“The stream of messages has become a torrent,” said Bradley Horowitz, a vice president of product development at Google. “There is no way to parse that amount of information that ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime. We think this has become a Google-scale problem.”
The message here is that Google intends to apply its algorithmic smarts to social networking and do away with the gunk – “A good day,” “Apples are yummy,” “Jasper is soooo funny” – that’s slowing us down.
But Google Buzz will look familiar to users of other social sites. And instead of being able to connect to all of your Facebook friends on Buzz, you can mostly connect only to folks within Gmail’s walled garden. While your Buzz posts can go out to your Twitter account, messages from the people that you follow on Twitter don’t come into the Buzz world.
Analysts said they found Google’s decision to act more as an aggregator than a standalone social networking site predictable. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace are the clear leaders in this market, and Google had to try something different.
“The other companies are pretty well established,” said Augie Ray, an analyst at Forrester Research. “This will have to be part of a larger-scale effort if it’s going to succeed.”
Mr. Horowitz said Google fully intends to bring other services like Facebook into Google Buzz and do things like creating richer connections to Twitter. In addition, Google has attempted to surpass the competition by adding a sophisticated mobile aspect to Buzz.
The location-based features of Buzz will be accessible on the mobile Web or through an app that for now is Android-only. The phone will use a GPS unit to find roughly where you and then bring up a list of nearby businesses. If you’re at Zucca’s restaurant on Castro Street in Mountain View, Calif., you can select that and then Buzz away, linking your thoughts to a place. These Buzzes will appear when your friends pull up maps from Google covering the area where you Buzzed.
Google Buzz will only appear as an option to about 1 percent of Gmail users as of Tuesday. Over the course of the week, it will roll out to all users.
Down the road, Google intends to make a corporate version of Buzz for companies that purchase its higher-end e-mail services. It has been testing this service internally.
“As an executive, I am able to peer down and see conversations that I could never see before,” said Vic Gundotra, a vice president of engineering at Google. “You find engineers who are sometimes reluctant to copying senior people on e-mails talking in a more relaxed manner.”