Find out the buzz with Google’s new approach to sharing

February 11 2010, 9:23am

Earlier this week Google announced the addition of a new social networking platform into its Gmail offering and its mobile products called Google Buzz - what the search giant is calling “a Google approach to sharing.” During a webcast event on Tuesday the company unveiled and demoed the platform which amalgamates features of both Facebook and Twitter, allowing people to follow friends, share pictures, video, links, status updates and a host of other things while wading through the noise of many social networking sites. The product takes no set up as it is built directly into Gmail and allows people to follow those whom they already email with regularly. Google Buzz is also said to go beyond status updates as it automatically pulls images from links, plays video inline and lets you flip through photos of a larger size at a faster speed. Google Buzz connects with platforms that people are already using such as Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader and Twitter. It is also strongly based in sharing and conversation and promotes the ease of ability to do so through @replies and conversation being directly fed to your email account. The platform is also being made accessible by mobile devices. Instead of simply shrinking it down to scale to that of a smartphone, Google has revealed a trio of new Buzz products including, GPS, information sharing on anything mentioned in their feeds and a new version of Google Mobile Maps for Symbian. While today Google Buzz is certainly consumer-focused, marketing vice-president for Google, Bradley Horowitz said, “Our intention is to launch this as an enterprise solution as well,” adding that enterprise functionality is being tested, and while it won’t be in version one, it will be forthcoming. “Organizing the world’s social information has become a large-scale problem, the kind Google loves to solve,” said Todd Jackson, Google Buzz product manager.