mysilentfury

YouTube is an excellent website, it really is.

Yesterday I got to sit down and watch a live press conference held by Google, on YouTube which is why I mentioned it,  to announce the release of their new social networking tool aptly named Buzz. It should, however, come as no shock that the new Buzz isn’t really anything new at all, but an almost carbon copy of Facebook and to a lesser extent, Twitter.

The way Google explains it, Buzz will allow Gmail users (and only Gmail users since it’s integrated into the Google mail app) to share things such as status updates, web links, pictures and video via their inbox to anyone who is “following” them. Nothing new or exciting about that.

The one feature that stands out to me is that you don’t have to hunt down and manually add all the folks that use Gmail in your contact list just to receive their updates. Upon activation of the service, Buzz will automatically adds those users to a list of people for you to follow.

Google has also stated that Buzz will be available for mobile users, which again, is nothing new. You can Facebook it up or Twitter your heart out from your shiny new iPhone already. But again, the feature that stands out most to me for the mobile version is that with the help of the Latitude app that Google has in their mobile package, Buzz will calculate your location and allow you to include that information, if you want to, with whatever it is you are sharing. It’s too bad my wife took over the iPhone, that’d be a real neat feature to play with.

If you are a huge Google fan like I am, you’ll probably end up using it. My hope is that in the future, they allow Buzz to update Facebook and Twitter so there will actually be a reason to use it, though in reality it will probably fall off the map just as orkut has. I just wonder what will become of Google Wave, which is similar to this except that you don’t need a Gmail inbox to use it.

Here are the promos for the normal and mobile versions: