Need to Know: Google Buzz

gallery

Buzz will also integrate with Picasa, Google Reader, YouTube, Flickr, Blogger and Twitter from its arrival in your Gmail account. Google has also hinted at a wider integration roadmap, with more to follow in the future.

What about privacy?

Perhaps in a sly dig at some of the troubles Facebook has been having of late when it comes to privacy, Google assures us this is at the forefront of Buzz's design.

"If I want to post [images] publicly I can share them to the world. Anything I post publicly will go to my followers and my Google profile," Jackson said at the launch.

"...Instantly indexed by Google's real time search. But I can also share privately. It's easy to post to groups and also easy to create custom groups.... We paid attention to these little details as we heard from users this was too hard to do on other websites."

All sounds good, but do any businesses really make use of Gmail? Why should they care?

We'll let Google answer that one. "We also plan to make Google Buzz available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features for sharing within organisations," it claims on its official blog.

Anything else in it for the business world?

Apart from providing another tool to aid collaboration, Buzz's openness means it is also somewhat reliant on developers as to how it evolves.

There will be a feed-based API made available to the dev community so that creative brains can merge Buzz with their own products. This API will have read/write functionality in the future.

When can I get it?

Google has said that it will be rolling out Buzz to existing Gmail users over the next few days, so keep checking back in your account to see if it's appeared. iPhone users can start buzzing straight away by visiting buzz.google.com and moving the associated icon onto their home screen.

Email to a friend

Print this page