Today's announcement from Google was the unveiling of their new social networking tool, Google Buzz. This new tool is available for use inside Gmail (though has only been rolled out to a small number of accounts so far) and from your mobile when visiting the Google Buzz website.
Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It's built right into Gmail, so you don't have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there's always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don't have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you're sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.
What this means is that it is treating your email client as a social network platform and the people you email the most will be the ones who you connect with automatically using Buzz. You can share whatever you want to with either everyone (the world) or just people on your contacts list and works with existing platforms such as Twitter, Flickr and Google Reader.
When you use this from your mobile phone you can also use Geo-location services to see what Buzz's are near your current location which brings a similar location-aware social networking feel as programs such Tweetie do for Twitter. It's also possible to comment and "like" people's Buzz's similar to how you can do this with RSS items in Google Reader. It also expands out to having a custom layer for Google Maps and appearing as a shortcut on all your Google pages though at present you can only use the full range of features on the iPhone and Android phones.
Unfortunately I've not yet been able to try this in Gmail as I'm not one of the fortunate ones who has had it enabled, but I've tried it on my iPhone. I haven't been able to do much on my iPhone either as it can't find anyone using it nearby, it's not bringing up anyone talk to using Gmail (and won't let me add new contacts to it), and won't let me post anything new to it. These problems are likely to be because my Gmail account doesn't have it, so now I just have to eagerly await it's activation before I can see if I can find a use for it.
I've seen people comment that it's trying to be the next Twitter and that there are already a large number of social networking aggregators out there that pull in feeds from different networks. I disagree with this - why does it matter that there are already alternatives out there? With more alternatives to chose from it breeds competition and with Google entering the social networking game it means that we're likely to see a pretty heated competition. I don't think Google want to replace Twitter either though, what they want is for emailing to become a social experience much like what they're trying to achieve with Google Wave.
UPDATE: Last night I was finally able to get access to Buzz from my Gmail account and at the same time was able to use the mobile interface. To start with it tells you which people you are auto-following and which ones are following you and then suggests you review these. The interface for adding and removing but it's disturbing that it auto-follows people. I know Google are trying to be helpful but I don't think it's a particularly nice feature. Some people have commented that this breaks privacy laws because of this initial setup but I think the real problem is that you can't block users from following you which means the difference between a private buzz and a public buzz is essentially just trivial.
The interface for viewing buzzes can also contain feeds from other places and looks like a combination of Gmail and Google Reader due to the way the messages can collapse and expand, and the way the like / comment feature works. One annoyance though is that when people reply to any of your buzzes you get this appear in your inbox. So if like me you have IMAP set up on your iPhone to synchronise with your Google Mail account then it could mean a lot of email alerts on your phone. Fortunately there is a way of avoiding this and that is to set up a filter which automatically archives messages containing "Buzz" in the subject so they "skip" the inbox (thanks for the suggestion Lena!).
The mobile interface isn't too bad but it could certainly be a lot better - I think the main problem is that difference in the way it is displayed making it harder to track what you have and haven't already read.
