MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Google says there’s already plenty of social networking information out there, and what the world really needs is a way to wrangle Twitter, MySpace and Facebook to tame information overload. If its “solution” guts the existing players, so much the better for the search giant.
Google has largely failed in its attempts to build a social networking site before, so it’s taking a different tack: With the Tuesday launch of Google Buzz, the company is pushing a new way to organize by building on a “destination” that millions of people already visit constantly, every day: Gmail.
“Buzz is like an entirely new world inside of Gmail,” product manager Todd Jackson said. “Organizing the worlds’ social information has become a large-scale problem, the kind Google likes to solve.”
Buzz is a distributed social networking service that lets users post publicly via their Google profiles, or privately via their Gmail contacts. Adopting Gmail’s rich e-mail handling capabilities, Buzz shows up as a virtual folder in Gmail, making small posts from friends and the comments on them part of their e-mail inbox.
Buzz makes sharing photos, videos and links very simple, with no need for URL shorteners. Photos come with a flip viewer, and videos play inline. If you want to share a web page, Buzz grabs the photos from the link you paste, letting you choose which ones you want to share with just a click.
Starting is simple: Users automatically begin by following the people they have e-mailed in the past. And in an attempt to cut through the noise, Buzz only puts Buzz posts into one’s inbox if the algorithms find them interesting. Those recommendations can surface interesting posts from people you don’t follow — for example, if two people you follow comment on a stranger’s post, Buzz may recommend that for you.
Buzz include updates on what you and your followers do on related Google sites, such as the photo-sharing site Picasa or on Google Reader. It also can include updates from Yahoo’s Flickr photo service and from Twitter, if a user decides to turn on those services.
Sergey Brin, one of Google’s co-founders, says Buzz is not just a Facebook clone, and hearkens back to his days communicating on bulletin boards.
Pressed to explain how it was useful to companies, Brin said he published a draft of his recent New York Times Google Books op-ed piece, and collected more than 50 comments that he used to tweak the piece.
“It is the best editing tool I have ever used,” Brin said.
Google plans a version of the product for its business customers in the coming months, Google executive Bradley Horowitz said.
One might think of Buzz as training wheels for Google Wave. As they can with that product, users can share in real time, with updates showing up immediately. It’s also oddly similar to Friendfeed, a product started by the former Google employee who created Gmail. Facebook bought that service in 2009 for $50 million.
Google also announced mobile integration for Buzz, with an updated homepage for smartphone, dedicated apps and updated Google Maps apps.
In one cool demo, Vic Gundotra, Google’s VP of mobile engineering, posted to Buzz in just seconds using the voice-recognition software, with the post immediately geotagged to Google by the phone’s GPS. That automatically updated Google pages, making the post findable on a Google map.
Google says it will make Buzz as open a protocol as it can — implicitly criticizing Facebook and Twitter, whose protocols are looked down — but no one uttered the words “open source” about the Buzz protocol.
Buzz opens to the public in waves starting Tuesday, and should begin showing up in Gmail users’ inboxes starting immediately. For those of you who have smartphones, and can’t wait, check buzz.google.com on your mobile.
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