Google hopes that instead of conversing on Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace, you'll instead turn to Google Buzz for sharing status updates, photos, and videos. Following are the five key features of Google Buzz
Blends with Gmail
The main way of accessing Google Buzz will be through Gmail. Below your inbox, there will be a tab for Buzz, allowing you to read status updates, photos, and video. The 40 people you converse with the most in Gmail and Gchat are automatically added as friends. Buzz updates also appear in your inbox if someone comments on your updates or comments, or someone directs a Buzz to your attention by using the familiar "@" symbol.
'Page Rank' for Status Updates
Google brought up that familiar criticism of social networks, that no one cares if you ate a vada or drink a coffee. To compensate for noise, Google Buzz lets you like and dislike status updates, and learn over time whether to show or collapse status updates from your friends. It also looks for conversations outside your direct group of followers and adds them to your feed as recommendations.
Media inside
Photos from Flickr and Picasa and video from YouTube appear as thumbnails in Google Buzz. Click a YouTube thumbnail, and the video will expand to play inline. Click on a photo, and it'll expand to fill most of the browser window, with the rest of the gallery in a narrow strip along the bottom of the screen. If you post a link in Buzz, you'll automatically be able to append images and the headline from that Web page. Finally, you can pull in tweets from Twitter (but no Facebook updates) into Buzz. Unfortunately, you can't send your Buzz updates out to Twitter or other social networks.
Mobile features
Google Buzz will be available as a mobile Web app, letting you dictate status updates by voice and geotag your posts. When looking on Google Mobile Maps, Buzz updates appear directly on the map, so you can read location-based updates. You can also look for any recent Buzz updates posted near your current location.
Private and Public
With each update you send, you'll have a choice of making it private or public. Private updates can go to all of your Buzz followers, or just a select group. Public updates are posted on your Google Profile page and are immediately indexed for Google Search.
Yahoo, MS hit out at rival
An hour after Google unveiled its new social network, Google Buzz, Yahoo and Microsoft took shots at their rival, claiming that they've been running a similar service for years. 'Busy people don't want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation,' Microsoft said in a statement, adding 'We've done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.'
Yahoo tweeted a similar gibe. 'Two years after #Yahoo! launched #Buzz, Google follows suit. Check out the original: http://buzz.yahoo.com/'
Yahoo launched Yahoo Buzz in 2008 as part of Yahoo Updates in an attempt to filter hundreds of social networks through Yahoo Mail, Messenger and Yahoo.com. But the company signaled in December that its social networking experiment wasn't working.
Similarly, Microsoft's Windows Live hasn't exactly taken the world by storm. Even Google has had its share of social network failure as well, with its wildly unpopular Orkut social network.
But a new Google social network that is fully integrated with Gmail, Google, Google Maps and other social networks has the blogosphere intrigued.
Google boss speaks out
Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the team behind Buzz, Google's service that aims to organise your online social life, started out small. But as they tested the system within Google, they 'found it so useful for internal communications that we became really motivated to bring this to the world,' he said in an interview recorded immediately following Google's announcement Tuesday.
For him, one of the most useful features is the ability 'to start typing a thought right off the bat without having to worry about disrupting other people...I can throw something out there and the people who are most interested and most relevant tend to pay attention and reply.'
In response to a question, he said that the company is concerned about privacy and security because their mobile service 'gives you the ability to share where you are.'
