Google Buzz: social networking hits Gmail

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 9 Feb 2010 at 18:36

Google has bolted a social-networking service into Gmail, called Google Buzz.

Buzz takes many of the concepts introduced with the experimental Google Wave and integrates them into the Gmail interface. The add-on sees live updates from web services such as Twitter, Flickr and Picasa pulled into a single stream.

This has become a large scale problem, a relevance problem, the kind of problem we like at Google

Google says Buzz is intended to reduce the information overload created by multiple social networks. "When you have 500 friends, or 5,000 friends, it's very difficult," said Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product marketing at Google. "You see things like 'Joe had a bagel for breakfast'. It's called TMI - too much information."

"The concentric circles of relationships are going to continue," Horowitz added. "This has become a large scale problem, a relevance problem, the kind of problem we like at Google."

The social networking updates are pulled into a dedicated "Buzz" section in the Gmail interface, so that they don't automatically clog-up users' inboxes. Confusingly, however, the "best" Buzz updates do enter the email inbox, when someone comments on them or one of your contacts replies directly to a message.

As with Google Wave, replies to messages are updated in real-time, with new comments appearing at the foot of email messages.

Buzz updates can be made public or privately to a group of friends. In a clear attack on Facebook, Google cited the example of sharing a set of wedding photos to a group of friends, with Buzz providing an ad-hoc gallery interface to make it easier to browse the photos.

Buzz has some clever tricks up its sleeve: post a link to share with friends, for example, and Buzz automatically picks out thumbnail images from the page, allowing you to point friends towards specific images.

Yet, while Buzz will pull in updates from services such as Twitter, it won't be possible to tweet from Buzz, meaning users will still require separate clients to update both services.

Google is also launching a mobile version of Buzz, which will use the phone's location to improve the relevancy of Buzz updates - allowing users to see what people are saying about a particular restaurant, for example.

Unsurprisingly, the service has not been embraced by rivals, with Microsoft claiming "people don't want another social-networking service".

The service is available now from the Google Buzz website.