we live in the social media age. with more and more communication taking place online, the social web has become the best and preferred way to share interesting things, chat in real time and stay connected to a larger number of people.
if you’re a gmail user, you may have recently noticed a new colorful tab right under the inbox labeled “buzz”. google buzz automatically brings social networking to gmail and the rest of the google-sphere. it’s a new way of conversing that is built right into gmail, so you don’t have to search for friends from scratch.
what’s the buzz about?
buzz’s key features, as explained on their home page, include:
- no set up is needed – the friends you email the most have automatically been added
- a rich and fast sharing experience
- public and private sharing – you can publish your comments or ideas to the world or just to your close ones
- inbox integration
- photo friendly
- connect sites you already use – import your stuff from site like twitter, flickr, picasa and google reader
- real time updates
- just the good stuff – buzz recommends certain posts and weeds out others that you would generally skip
buzz lets you go beyond simple status messages. it allows you to share photos, videos and a whole lot more…
- it provides links to websites and content from around the net
- it shows thumbnails when linked to photos on sites such as flickr and allows you to blow up the image to almost the entire browser by simply clicking on it
- there are public and private settings for posts – similar to facebook
- it sends you email updates so you don’t miss what’s going on
- you can use the @reply system – just like twitter – so if you @reply someone, it will send a buzz to the person’s inbox
google buzz for your mobile device
google has launched 3 different ways to make buzz accessible via your mobile phone.
- google mobile’s website
- buzz.google.com (currently only available for android and iphone)
- google mobile maps
what do you think of google buzz? will you use it? post your comments.
[sources: google, googleblog,blogspot.com, lifehacker.com, mashable]
