Google Buzz-ing With New Social Perks
Google is taking direct aim at Twitter and Facebook, and putting the whole mess on Google Maps and Gmail.
Google has integrated Buzz into Gmail so users can keep up with their entire network of friends on Gmail without finding all their friends all over again. This could be huge for Google’s other services like Friend Connect which are interesting, but so far not very popular. It could mean that people really start paying attention to all their Google products more to see those little snippets from friends that are so addicting.
The picture sharing is especially interesting when linked up with Picasa and Flickr — which is much better than putting great pictures into the cloister of sites like Facebook.
And Google says the whole system is designed specifically for phones.
On your phone, Google Buzz is much more than just a small screen version of the desktop experience. Mobile devices add an important component to sharing: location.
Posts tagged with geographical information have an extra dimension of context — the answer to the question “where were you when you shared this?” can communicate so much. And when viewed in aggregate, the posts about a particular location can paint an extremely rich picture of that place.
I’m excited to play around with Buzz, especially because it could make checking up on friends a part of checking e-mail — something that can get tedious when one needs to head to Facebook and Twitter and Flickr and MySpace etc.
[Via Google]
