Google Buzz

Google Buzz is a service that adds social-networking to the Googlemail
(Gmail) webmail service. We took Google Buzz for a ride to find out
what it is, how to get it, and why it is different from Facebook and
Twitter.

Google says that Google Buzz offers significant improvements over
existing social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, although at
this early stage of its development it's hard to see how.

Google Buzz has been designed as a single dashboard to help users deal
with the often massive amount of information they receive through
existing social networking sites.

Unfortunately, at this point Google Buzz has no links into Facebook,
which puts Google in direct competition with the world's biggest
social-networking site: and will immediately make the
'simpler-is-better' proposition a fallacy for Facebook's 400 million
users.

To use Google Buzz, you must first have a Gmail account. (For the
uninitiated, Gmail is known as Googlemail in the UK.)

Go to Google.com/buzz, and follow the simple instructions. At this
point, you should get a 'Buzz' icon and link beneath the inbox link in
the lefthand navigation of your webmail browser window. Right now it
seems that not all users immediately get this tab, and it doesn't yet
appear in our webmail unless we go into it via the Google Buzz
homepage.
Google Buzz: go mobile

Users can also access Google Buzz via Google Apps on mobile phones.
Simply surf on over to buzz.google.com on you phone, sign in and
accept the user agreement. The Google Buzz iPhone app is little more
than a shortcut to a Gmail page optimised for mobile, with Buzz added.

Google Buzz iPhone

Like all the Google iPhone 'apps' this insists on booting another
Safari browser window every time you go in. It's simple to add posts,
however, which show your location (should you desire it to be so). You
can also post direct from Google Maps.

Quite fun is the Buzz map, which lets you see who is Buzzing in your
neighbourhood - kind of like an amalgam of Foursquare and Twitter
(albeit with security risks entailed). This is a good way of finding
fellow Buzzers in your area.

Google Buzz Maps

You can import posts from Twitter into Google Buzz, but in our tests
this was taking a long time (over an hour and a half as of 10:49am on
February 10). This is clearly not much good for Twitter users, used to
almost immediate response. Of course, it's likely that at this early
stage Google Buzz is simply feeling the strain, and things will speed
up.

You can also automatically import content from other Web 2.0 sites,
such as Flickr, Picasa and YouTube.