Bzzzzzz

By now, you're all well aware of Google Buzz, announced just 3 short days ago while you were out building snowmen. Buzz is Google's new social networking service (read: attempted Facebook-killer), built directly into Gmail, and since it's an "opt-out" service, Google can claim to already have millions of users. To be fair, people (meaning the people I know) genuinely do seem to be using it already, and the fact that it integrates with Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Blogger, YouTube, and Google Reader (note the annoying absence of Facebook). Here's Google's quick intro video:



And they have a web-based mobile Buzz app as well, which includes some nice location-based abilities.

Of course, there have been complaints about it too. One of our lab consultants has been complaining that it's very CPU intensive, slowing his machine down to a crawl, and Fugitivus has some rather coarse language to go on with her very legitimate privacy concerns. (They're working on fixing that problem, I'm told). Both Microsoft and Yahoo! had sour grapes moments. PC World gives us 5 reasons to love, and 5 reasons not to love Buzz.

TechCrunch has a good summary article on the new phenomenon.