This morning, Google is announcing some exciting new features for two of its most popular applications.
Team Red, as we affectionately call ourselves, is present at the Googleplex in Mountain View, and we’ll be live blogging the event, giving you, dear reader, a fascinating play-by-play. Stay tuned for updates! The event will begin at 10 a.m. Pacific (UTC -8). Just refresh this post to see new content as events unfold.
Additional on-the-fly research and images from RWW journalist Frederic Lardinois.
ReadWriteWeb’s full coverage and analysis of Google Buzz:
11:11: The event is over! Time to chase people down and ask some more pointed questions. Stay tuned to RWW for ongoing analysis.
11:08: Developers, here’s the Google Code page for Buzz’s APIs.
11:06: Will Buzz results appear high in Google search results? They’re not doing anything special to promote those results, but users can search within Buzz. And all posts are indexed in real time.
11:04: Buzz is live.
11:02: Buzz will pull in tweets, and will publish to Twitter as a Twitter client in a later version. The team has put a lot of spam controls in place.
10:58: Will Google’s social products succeed? Brin says he’s seen a lot more productivity from using Google Buzz internally. Horowitz says the approach – creating something useful, not just entertaining – is different from “anything else I’ve tried.”
10:56: Buzz user feeds will be available via PubSubHubBub/XML. Google will be releasing APIs. Google intends to make it as open as possible. They also want to integrate Buzz with other Google products such as the homepage.
10:52: Sergei Brin takes the stage. Fangirl here is very excited. Q&A starts. Buzz could integrate with Wave – a lot of functionality is inspired by Wave.
10:51: Buzz will launch at 11 a.m., when it will begin to roll out to Gmail users. Journos here will get it first. For the rest of Gmail users, they’ll get Buzz within a few days.
10:50: Google is launching Buzz as an enterprise product soon, as well. “It will change the way businesses work around the world.” Wasn’t Wave supposed to do that?
10:45: Mobile Buzz will have a “nearby” setting to see posts and pics from folks around you. Makes the product a bit of a Foursquare/Yelp competitor?
10:42: Buzz allows for mobile posting by voice. The user speaks, and Google transcribes the audio into a geotagged text post.
10:40: You can use Buzz from Google’s mobile homepage, mobile apps, and from a new Google Maps app for the major platforms. These apps will translate latitude and longitude into “real locations.” Buzz will take its best guess and ask for confirmation. It’s tied in with Place Pages.
10:39: You can use Buzz from Google’s mobile homepage, mobile apps, and from a new Google Maps app for the major platforms.
10:37: Location is a powerful signal for relevancy. In the digital world we have not yet elevated location as a powerful signal. Computers speak latitude and longitude, but humans have a hard time interpreting this information.
10:35: Mobile: “You are going to love the new product experiences we will launch today.” Consume and use Buzz on your mobile. One of Google’s great insights was pagerank, which gave websites relevancy. Now, we need to find relevancy in social expressions on Twitter and other social networks. “It’s easy to start drowning in this.” How do we find relevancy in the real world? What signals do we use?
10:32: Google Buzz will have @replies with auto-complete. Users who are @ replied will receive inbox notifications.
10:29: When a user posts to Google Buzz, he can share publicly to followers and his Google profile, or privately to his existing Gmail groups or custom groups. Notifications of shares and comments will appear in a user’s inbox with a special Buzz icon next to those items. Comments will appear in real time.
10:25: The Buzz tab will be located right below your inbox tab. Gmail will “know” who your friends are. The social stream features Yahoo! Meme-like content previews and will play nicely with Flickr and YouTube. Pictures will open in a lightbox-type UI. Shared links will feature headlines and thumbnails.
10:22: Buzz will surface your social graph by having you auto-follow the people you email and IM with the most. It will have a rich and fast-sharing experience for multimedia sharing. Sharing will be public and Google-indexed, or private – just depending on how users choose to share. It’ll be integrated with your inbox in a way that goes beyond normal email. Finally, it will filter out the garbage and leave “just the good stuff.”
10:20: Google is launching Google Buzz, a Google approach to sharing. Todd Jackson is the product manager, and he reveals that it’s built into Gmail.
10:15: Google VP Product Marketing Bradley Horowitz kicks off the event: “I’ve got something exciting… We’re going to talk about sharing.” He’s talking about finding the right audience for your content, real-time sharing and tools for attention management.
10:13: Wondering how much trouble I’d get in for casually paging through the slide preso on the podium laptop before the event starts… Probably not worth the scoop.
10:00: The event’s a wee bit late kicking off, but Dodge is chatting about his work with Google Apps. He says the product range is already quite broad; they’re working now to create a deeper set of features.
9:48: The music is pumping and the luminaries are trickling in and getting caffeinated. I’m sitting next to Jeremiah Owyang and Don Dodge.
