Buzz URL : http://www.google.com/buzz

Google and Facebook are on a collision course in the increasingly competitive market for social networking services.

On Tuesday, Google introduced a new service called Google Buzz, a way for users of its Gmail service to share updates, photos and videos. The service will compete with sites like Facebook and Twitter, which are capturing an increasing percentage of the time people spend online.

The links shared on those social networks are also sending a growing amount of traffic to sites across the Web, potentially weakening Google’s position as the prime navigation tool on the Internet.

Separately, Facebook plans to announce on Wednesday that it is improving the live chat service on its site by allowing it to be integrated into other services like AIM, AOL’s instant messaging network, which is among the most popular in the United States.

Buzz is Google’s boldest attempt to build a social network that can compete with Facebook and Twitter. The service is built into Gmail, which already has 176 million users, according to comScore, a market research company. And Buzz comes with a built-in circle of friends, a group that is automatically selected by Google based on the people that a user communicates with most frequently in Gmail and on Google’s chat service.

Like other social services, Buzz allows users to post status updates that include text; photos from services like Google’s Picasa and Yahoo’s Flickr; videos from YouTube; and messages from Twitter. Analysts say many of its features mimic those of Facebook.

“It is a direct challenge to Facebook, in particular,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a social media analyst with the Altimeter Group.

Still, Buzz faces a struggle against Facebook, which recently announced, on the occasion of its sixth birthday, that it had 400 million users. Buzz also risks further overwhelming people who are struggling with Web services that generate ever-increasing amounts of information.

But Google executives said that, on the contrary, Buzz would help tackle the problem of information overload, as Google would apply its algorithms to help people find the information most relevant to them.

“The stream of messages has become a torrent,” Bradley Horowitz, vice president for product development at Google, said in an interview. “We think this has become a Google-scale problem.”

Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, said that by offering social communications, which have primarily been used for entertainment purposes, Buzz would bridge the gap between work and leisure.

“Bridging those two worlds is very powerful,” Mr. Brin said at a press conference, adding that he had used Buzz to help him write an Op-Ed article for The New York Times by soliciting input from other Google employees.

Google has also woven Buzz into mobile phones, through a mobile Web site and a Google mapping application. Users will be able to see updates that friends have posted from particular spots.

Read complete story @ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/technology/internet/10social.html

Soruce :- Gmail BlogSpot

When we launched the Gmail blog exactly one year ago, our goal was to provide you with new feature announcements, insight into how the Gmail team works, and tips on how to become a Gmail ninja. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading our posts, and to celebrate our birthday, here’s a look back at the past year and a recap of our 10 most read tips:

10) Have Gmail do your laundry – How to suggest new features for Gmail. We always like hearing from you.

9) Tips for importing old email to Gmail – A post on how to make the switch to Gmail as seamless as possible.

8) Edit contacts right from your chat list – When we released the newest version of Gmail, it came with some new bells and whistles. This one will help you clean up your chat list and change contact information quickly.

7) 2 Hidden ways to get more from your Gmail address – You can insert certain characters to your email address to get additional names out of it — all of which still make it to your inbox.

6) How to find any email with Gmail search – To take the best advantage of Gmail search, we explain how to use search operators so you can find any email the first time.

5) 5 little-known Gmail features you may not yet know about – When we released the newest version of Gmail, there were a bunch of really useful features people didn’t yet know about. So we told you about them.

4) Top 10 little known Gmail features (and Part 2) – In this post, we explained ten Gmail features that people generally didn’t know about. From “custom from” to creating events in Gmail, this post goes over key features any serious Gmail user needs to know.

3) Getting Gmail anywhere: IMAP versus POP – A lot of people choose to get Gmail on mobile phones and destkop mail clients, so we went over the two most popular ways people do so and showed the key benefits of using IMAP — which we’ve provided for free since the fall.

2) 3 Gmail Labs features that will spice up your inbox – This post covers how to enable and use the most popular Gmail Labs features: Superstars, Pictures in chat and Quick Links.

1) 9 reasons to archive – From the sophisticated to the snarky, these tips fueled the most viewed post in Gmail blog history. If this doesn’t get you to archive, then we don’t know what will.

Thanks for reading this past year, and we hope to provide even more tips this year — so stay tuned