Okay. I’ve just learned I’m the proud and lucky (thanks to my guardian angel) owner of a Google Buzz account.
What is it? Actually, I’m still trying to figure that out exactly.
Try to imagine Google Talk (chat) extended with bits of Twitter (followers and followees, but that’s not how they’re called) and geolocation, integrated within Google Mail with an interface that’s slightly reminiscent of Google Wave presented in a blogpost-like format (there has to be a RSS feed somewhere underneath, but I didn’t find it); with possible post upvoting as in Digg or Reddit (but no downvoting).
And you can also mix in stuff from Picasa, Google Reader, Twitter itself, Flickr or blogs.
The above looks like a web 2.0 keyword soup; this is a good reflection of my first impression 🙂
That’s what I was able to gather after using it for 5 minutes. I certainly missed a boatload of things and got some wrong.
http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/ summarises pretty well in my opinion what you can do and what you can expect you’ll be able to do.
It is apparently done in the way of “everything-can-be-integrated-in-gmail” but nothing can get out (i.e. if you change your status, it will not be reflected in FB or twitter. I’m not sure it will work with people w/o a gmail address (which is the situation for me, the vast majority of my followers — and those I follow on twitter have no gmail address).
Sure limits the interest for me.
OB: thanks for the URL, much easier to comprehend Buzz this way for geeks 🙂
Ollivier : I don’t care much about status updates, so it doesn’t bother me that they’re not reflected. Actually I prefer it that way.
Ollivier: Well, the fact that you need to have an account is not really different from other services. Your followers had to create a Twitter account or a Facebook account just as well. The difference here (for good or bad, depending what your use case is) is that your Google account can be used for other things. I wonder if the whole OpenID thing can work across all of those, actually, but I certainly am too lazy to check.
Olliivier: Actually, if you just want someone to follow you, they don’t need an account (but you do, of course). You can just send them to your google profile. It’s what you get redirected to after you go to http://google.com/profiles
Buzz is an interesting thing. Buzz turns an email service into a primeval social community tool. I for ever admired Google for their search temper. However here I oppose. My life is in the present a majour threat. Even so Google started addressing the privacy concerns, Buzz nevertheless requires to overcome its burden. They seem to be playing with others informations. Google has to do some better reasoning about its succeeding moves.