Today Google announced its latest social application, designed to bring the fire hose of social media and status updates down to a useful trickle of the most "interesting" bits. Dubbed Google Buzz, the service is designed to offer easier ways to share links, photos, and other information, corral all those things shared by friends and other connections, and integrate well with other services in an open way.
It's "a Google approach to sharing," according to Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz.
While the rumor was that Buzz would be Google's "Twitter-killer," it would actually be missing the point to describe it that way. Buzz offers a way to share status updates, if you want to use it that way. It can also be used to share links, videos, photos, and more—in this regard, it's more akin to Facebook posts or even quick-blogging services like Tumblr or Posterous. Buzz can also integrate with other social services to share any publicly accessible things you post to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader, Blogger, and any service that offers an RSS feed.
Buzz also offers a way for anyone you're connected to via your Google contacts to comment on the things you share, much like your friends can on Facebook. Further, it adopts the
de facto standard of using "@replies" to send notices to specific users.
In addition, Buzz gives users control over how information is shared. Posts can be made public or private. You can create groups of contacts, such as "co-workers" and mark items as shared with only that group, multiple groups, or just a single contact.
Everything that is shared publicly is instantly indexed by Google search index, and Buzz streams and comments update in real time.
Aggregation aggravationBut, the goal of Buzz is more ambitious than just offering a Twitter or Facebook status clone. Buzz is designed to aggregate all the content that is already being shared among your connections on social sites all over the Web, much like Friend Feed. That information can become unmanageable when your contacts number in the hundreds, thousands, or more.
"It's harder and harder to separate the noise," Jackson said during a press conference earlier today. "Organizing the world's social information has become a large scale problem, the kind Google loves to solve."
To solve the overload problem, Buzz filters all those items, separating the "good" buzz from the "bad" buzz. It assigns a relevancy score to all the items being shared by those you are connected to, much like how Google assigns a relevancy score to Web search results. When you view your stream, Buzz will display the items you're most likely to be interested in, and collapse items that you're not likely to care much about.
It will also recommend other items from those you might not even follow, based on a variety of criteria, such as whether or not other contacts you follow are commenting or sharing the item. These recommendations can be fine-tuned over time based on your feedback to the recommendation system.
To make sure you don't miss anything, Buzz integrates with Gmail. Items that the system recommends to you, or items you are getting comments on, will show up inline in your Gmail inbox. Buzz also uses the same keyboard shortcuts, so if you're comfortable with the Gmail interface you'll feel right at home using Buzz.
Mobile Buzz and open standards Furthermore, Google Buzz is also built with mobile devices in mind. Applications for Android and iPhone will let users sort "buzzes" via location, and Buzz will do its best to turn GPS coordinates into relevant locations such as "Woodfield Mall," "The Berghoff" or "Wrigley Field." An updated version of Google Mobile Maps for Android will also let you turn on a Buzz layer and see "buzzes" nearby or attached to any particular location.
"We want Buzz to be the paragon for what it means to create a social destination that is standards compliant," Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering for Google Mobile, said during today's press conference.
Buzz is built using a number of open standards, such as Atom, Activity Streams, and PubSubHubbub. Future support for OAuth, Salmon, and WebFinger is also planned. Open standards advocate Tim Bray told Ars that use of PubSubHubbub "seems like a 'A Good Thing' to me." However, our own Ryan Paul wasn't as thrilled, noting that the current open standards for social networking interoperation are "more painful" than a straightforward REST API using JSON.
There is good news for standards and interoperability mavens, though. "We're just getting started," Jackson said during the press conference. "We can wire this up in so many ways, so we are rolling it out today to let users and developers steer its future course." A page has been
set up on Google Code for the APIs to connect to Google Buzz.
Future plans include integrating with other Google services, such as Wave and Voice, where integration of data is most appropriate. Google also hopes to add more services that can tie it to Buzz. And a version of Buzz geared towards the needs of enterprise customers is also in the works.
The question is, will users already juggling accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and other services want to use yet another "social network?"
For its part, Microsoft isn't convinced. "Busy people don't want another social network; what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We've done that," Dharmesh Mehta, director of Product Management, Windows Live, told Ars. "Hotmail customers have benefitted from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008."
However, Buzz is designed to offer just the integration that Microsoft says users want. On top of that, it will offer a way for users to suss out the wheat from the chaff with its relevancy rankings and filtering. It's not quite the easy data portability that some users would like, but if it advances interoperability among the growing social networks that many increasingly rely on, Buzz will serve as a helpful step as the ways we communicate continue to evolve.
Google Buzz is being rolled out over the course of the next few days. Gmail users should see a notice when they log in once it has been activated on their account. We'll be sure to share our thoughts once we have an opportunity to put it through its paces.
