In a bid to take on competition in the social networking space like Facebook and Twitter head-on, Google has launched Google Buzz, which is possibly Mountain View's most ambitious foray into the social networking space.
The most interesting part of Google Buzz is the mobile version of the product. The mobile version integrates a slew of location based features that makes it an attractive alternative to the numerous location based services available on the smartphones like the iPhone today.
By integrating this new service with Gmail, Google has instantly created a social network of 150 million users who may now share updates, photos, videos and links with their friends as well as with the public.
Google also says Buzz simplifies user privacy by letting them post updates to select user groups from their contacts.
Google Buzz can be accessed on your iPhone in several ways:
- Buzz.Google.com iPhone web app
- Buzz layer on Google Maps for mobile (via iPhone's Safari browser)
- Shortcut to Buzz on Google's homepage.
- Voice shortcut on Google mobile app : By speaking 'post buzz' followed by whatever you would like to post.
Google Buzz on mobile comes with some interesting options that make use of your iPhone's location tagging feature.
Following/Nearby Views: Buzz users on mobile can choose to view updates either from the contacts that they follow or check out public updates from other users who are geographically in the vicinity
Place tagging: Users willing to tag their updates with location are offered suggestions about places/businesses in the vicinity that they may pick from. Google says this makes much more contextual sense than merely tagging updates with latitude/longitude data
Buzz on Map View: Users accessing Buzz from Google Maps can view updates from people in the neighborhood. Our readers might recall Google's launch of Favorite Places last year. With Google Buzz, users may also visit the Place Page of these businesses to post an update.
The service is currently in the process of being rolled out and should be available to everyone in a few days. By integrating many location based features, Buzz has the potential to post significant threat to the likes of Twitter and Facebook.
But the company has not announced any plans to launch an iPhone app for the service. It will be interesting if that happens. We have seen that Google prefers to launch iPhone web apps instead of native iPhone apps to avoid Apple's approval process. But it might want to reconsider that decision if it wants to make an impression among iPhone users who have access to Facebook's iPhone app, which is probably one of the best iPhone apps available on the App Store and some very good Twitter iPhone apps like Tweetie.
Do you think Google Buzz will pose a threat to Twitter or Facebook?
[via Google Mobile Blog]
and buzz is crap why waste peoples time with this
shite
have you tried it? the location aspect to it is quite cool. too soon to tell if it'll take off…
I personally think google is biting off more than they can chew right now without enough seemles integration between there software they are going to fend off all of there fellow companies and alienate themselves as a company and grow to big into to many areas already dominated by devices and software that are much better than there own and while th location services are cool it will be interesting to c how they are implemented and also if google can really pull this off it's no small feat to dethrone facebook if they can do it than hats off to them that's dam impressive
As someone who, for privacy and battery life reasons, only turns location service on on my iPhone when need for a map application, and as someone who practically lives in Google Reader on both desktop and iPhone, the iPhone implementation of Buzz sucks.
I'm trying to read my feeds in Reader/Safari and get interrupted every 5 seconds with a request to turn my location services on.
I consider my most used mobile site/app broken.