Just got buzz switched on – my initial thoughts having played around with it for 5 mins are that it looks quite interesting. I was a big fan of FriendFeed, and its a bit like that in terms of the flow. Obviously there’s a huge potential for attempting to process vast amounts of information flow – but you just got to filter out the irrelevant stuff (which can be tricky and time consuming). I think it’s interesting to have it integrated with your email account – I think most people have their email open all the time – I do. So there’s no real friction flitting in and out of buzz. I know some people have been giving out about the fact that Google have just blasted this out,  there’s no explicit opt-in, you get it whether you like it or not. Similar to what facebook have done regarding UI changes. But this does not pollute the gmail experience directly – yes, its automatically turned on within the application itself, but you still have to opt to click the Buzz link. Its interesting, once you have all your profiles set up in Google Profile its straightforward to have all those profiles aggregated.

Obviously a huge part of this is that Google now gets to see your entire social graph and digital footprint (if you add in all your profiles), which in turn will mean they can start rolling out more focused social search as well as targetting more and more ads at you.

I haven’t read too much of what others have said – be interesting to see what people think of it after using it for a while. When you think about FriendFeed, the user-base for that was tiny – max 2-3 million I think. But gmail had 176 million unique users in December 2009 so that really is rolling out real-time web to a massive audience – much bigger than Twitter which is plateau-ing at the moment allegedly.

Thats my tuppenceworth anyway

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Google announced yesterday its real-time search plans and released a screencast of how it will allegedly work. It will include content from twitter, news, blogs and social networking sites. It’s hardly a surprise, I find myself more and more searching twitter search (summize.com) these days to find information, or to just use my twitter community to push information to me and find it that way. I also use delicious to find ranked and tagged information. I tend to value more what the community i.e. real people think more so than Google. Its interesting how for a lot of professional related search – Im really looking for interesting blog posts, or links to very specific information – and Google does’t deliver that to my without friction I find. I may not be the typical user, but you’d have to think that there is a real need for niche search products. I don’t find the most interesting stuff through Google anymore its most definitely social – and its only beginning so very interesting times ahead. Maybe the Google Realtime search will address some of these issues. Here’s the video:

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