I got Buzzed this afternoon. No, not like that. I (Google Apple Fanboy) had no idea Google was rolling out another new product/service — “Buzz” a kind of cross among Twitter, friendfeed, and Google’s own Latitude. First of all, it’s a good name. Buzz (as in bees) vs. tweet (as in birds) — the birds and the bees, get it? Also, I like the sound-impression of “I buzzed you” and “I’m buzzing” and “Let’s get buzzed.” I’m already dubbing my buzz groups “hives” (although not in “I’ve got hives”). Problem is, I only have two others in it at the moment and one is my better half. So, please join my hive soon.
Now, it’s not like we all need yet another social networking distraction to waste time with, but I see a lot of potential for Buzz. Despite rough edges it has some significant advantages over Twitter: no 140 character limit and a non-chronological timeline (in other words, related buzzes cluster and bubble up to the top of the queue). This means you can actually have conversations with specific person(s) if you want or you can use it as you would Twitter by tweet-buzzing. Buzz is also integrated with Gmail, so alerts and access to Buzz are always there within one interface (if you use Gmail):
There is also a mobile version that that works as a web app on the iPhone, complete with realtime mapping (that’s the Latitude part). You can connect other services like WordPress blogs, Flickr, Picasa albums, Twitter, Facebook so that updates to those appear to your followers. (I wonder if Posterous will support Buzz too — I love using Posterous for quick photo posts to multiple services, especially with my iPhone with which it is less convenient to direct post to WordPress.
I definitely recommend that you give Buzz a spin. If you have a Gmail account, you should see a “Buzz” link appear under your inbox link sometime soon. I’m so cool I got mine just a couple hours after release. ;-)
Read more first impressions pro and con about Buzz here.
