Google debuts Buzz social networking

Google announced on Tuesday that it was immediately rolling out Google Buzz, a location-aware social networking tool highly integrated with its Gmail client, Google Maps and a new Android app.

Available as a new tab in the standard Gmail interface, the service will share links, Gmail status updates, YouTube videos and Picasa photos. Other users can leave comments on each others shared data. Users to share Buzz can be automatically added from contacts, suggested by Google through frequency of correspondence, or selected individually. Buzz updates can be sent to Twitter, but as yet there is no automatic importation of tweets.

The service includes a recommendation engine that will try to suggest Buzz content users may find interesting, and will attempt to refine those recommendations over time by having users click "not interested" on recommended status updates if they don't want to see that sort of update again.

"Buzz also weeds out uninteresting posts from the people you follow — collapsing inactive posts and short status messages like "brb". These early versions of ranking and recommendations are just a start; we're working on improvements that will help you automatically sort through all the social data being produced to find the most relevant conversations that matter to you," the company said in a blog post.

"It has become a core belief of ours that organising the social information on the web is a Google-scale problem," said Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager, demonstrating Google Buzz at the company's headquarters a day before Tuesday's event. An astounding amount of social-media content is produced every day, across Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and personal blogs, and Google's faith that it could one day index and organise the entire internet has been shaken by this explosion in web content.

Google Buzz' location-based features will use GPS and various algorithms to identify where users are by place name; once users agree with its choice, they can leave Buzz updates that will appear on a new layer of Google Maps to friends, as well as being part of a general Buzz stream.

"A lot of the world's information is what's happening with my friends," said Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management at the company. "We can't achieve [Google's] mission unless we solve these parts of that problem."

Google executives said that they intended Buzz to be open, that it will respect users' privacy decisions, will not lock up data and will have an open application programming interface. An Enterprise Buzz, linked to Google Apps, will be made available later: meanwhile, Google Buzz is being rolled out to its first users now and will become available to all Gmail users over the next week.

Via CNET News.com and ZDNet.co.uk