Google announced this week the official launch of Buzz, a status and microblogging service that is joined at the hip with Gmail. It integrates with other Google services and can import data from a number of mainstream websites including Flickr and Twitter. We conducted hands-on testing to see how it compares to other popular social networking services.
As social networking aficionados will be quick to recognize, there isn’t much in Buzz that is new or original. Google has taken a smattering of good ideas from a number of popular services and attempted to combine them in a way that meshes well with the Gmail experience. The end result is a service that shows promise but lacks the requisite killer feature or innovative twist that it will need in order to truly keep people engaged.
It’s important to understand that replies are attached directly to the item they are responding to rather than existing as distinct messages. Buzz supports embedding inline images in messages and doesn’t impose limits on the length of posted text. These characteristics of Buzz put it in the same class as FriendFeed and Facebook rather than Twitter.
When Buzz was first unveiled, I was hopeful that it would support the kind of real-time communication features that impressed us in Wave. Unfortunately, the reality is a bit of a compromise. Messages don’t appear as they are being typed, but they do show up automatically when they are posted. This means that you can see the latest messages and comments without having to refresh the page.
When a new comment is added to an old item, the whole item gets bumped to the top of the stream. This means that the stream is sorted by activity level rather than being a purely chronological representation. There doesn’t appear to be a way to configure sorting behavior.
When you view the stream, new comments and messages that you haven’t seen before are highlighted with a yellow strip along the side. This highlighting is applied on stream items and also individual comments. You will see the count of new items next to the Buzz entry in Gmail’s navigation sidebar.
Source: arstechnica.com
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Tags: Buzz API page, Buzz items, Buzz post, relevant buzz item