I’m Feeling A Groovy Buzz

Getting tired of the Google Buzz wordplay all over the headlines and blogs? Well it’s all over the place because, unsurprisingly, Google just unveiled something many people will pile onto even though there are plenty of companies whining about how they had this kind of idea years ago. Too bad for them that in their sector it is Google who has earned a reputation not just for doing good but doing things very well. This is brilliant.       

Thought you all could use clarification from David K’s article as things seem to have changed. Even though we are slumming it in cattle class on the Windows Mobile version of this Google Maps Mobile release (cab), it is not as functionless for us as I had thought last night. This morning I found that we now can add our own buzzes (pic related) from our phones and it appears Google has rolled out Buzzing into Gmail where you may discuss whatever two strangers in this situation discuss when one taps the other’s Buzz bubble on the phone and decides to type something onto that guy’s buzz. When that happens he gets an email which some may start to find annoying but I’m naturally having some fun with it.

According to Google as of the time of this posting, unlike the Android and iPhone crowd, we cannot access buzz.google.com on our phones to get its phone functionality (same deal with fastflip.googlelabs.com, tried both sites in Opera and PIE, no dice), we cannot buzz on a place page (meaning if you search for pizza you cannot tap the pizza place’s address and buzz “hey I just ordered pizza” for others to see when tapping on the pizza operation’s place too). No voice shortcuts. I’m having trouble understanding what voice could add to the buzz function, I’d be surprised if it were full voice recognition for the buzzing given technological and acoustic limitations of buzzing with your voice on city streets but you never know with this company. Lastly no buzz icon shortcuts. But maybe that has changed as I now have a buzz icon which you can see on the bottom right of the screen shot, just above the My Location button.

Mark my words, unlike Google Web Accelerator this thing has legs and it is a serious threat to everyone else in the social networking world (and perhaps this is the tip of the iceberg of Google’s social networking implementations). Google won’t take forever to make more money than they lose as a result of rolling this out. They won’t lose focus of their other operations while going all out on this either. This will bring a lot of people onto Google Maps with their phones which is really good for very local advertising (I just managed to use it to advertise in Central Park) and it will rake in data, for better or worse, about what people do, where, when, you name it. This will affect positively other things Google does like Search and Traffic with so many more people using Latitude. In having done this Google has planted a huge flag in the social networking business. Google has demonstrated that they haven’t run out of new great ideas yet and Microsoft has demonstrated that they haven’t run out of boats to miss.

Now’s not a good time for spammers to learn how to spoof GPS signals. Though that would have spared me from a very snowy hike through the park just to plug this site on Google Maps.

Doug Simmons