Announced yesterday and being rolled out slowly to users of Gmail, Google Buzz is at first appearances just a Google version of Twitter. This is a smart move on Google’s part since a lot of people are using twitter, and will intuitively know how to use the new service. So what is Buzz, why did Google release it and why is it exciting?

In short, Buzz combines the best of chat, email, wave, twitter, reddit, and facebook wall posts. Buzz is integrated in your Gmail and lets you publish whatever your heart desires for all of your gmail contacts to see. What follows is then a conversation that happens in real-time, but doesn’t require real-time attention from the user to keep it going. Since it’s in my gmail account, I already want to use it instead of twitter. Not only do I automatically have all of my gmail contacts in my Buzz (immediately more than I have on twitter in fact), but it also allows me to post URLs, large blocks of text, and I only need my gmail window open.

So what else can you use it for? Sergey Brin used it internally within Google to quickly get feedback from a large audience for his op-ed article for the New York Times, meaning it has collaboration potential as well. So then how does this compare with Google Wave? TechCrunch said it best: if Wave is the future, then Buzz is the present. Google Wave is still an alpha product, and Buzz is a feature in Gmail which means (shockingly) that it’s a production quality product. That being said, most people can’t quite figure out what to use Google Wave for since it is underdeveloped and too forward thinking. However everyone seems to get how to use Buzz… in the time I’ve written this article I’ve already had a handful of new followers on Buzz.

Another exciting thing about Buzz is that even though you may find it controversial, Google can apply their traditional data mining and intelligence algorithms to your Buzzing. There’s an overwhelming amount of social  media out there and from the users perspective you can’t use it if its too “noisey”. Sergey Brin said in a recent interview:

“Extracting signal from noise is one of our core competencies, [...] I think that now peoples’ personal communications are getting to be on a scale comparable to that of web search, so those technologies are becoming far more critical. “

I’m excited about Google Buzz because hopefully Google will know what I want from my social network, and they’ve already alluded to this:

“We’re going to see which articles you like, which ones you comment on, which posts you read, things like that. And I think we’ll be able to try to tailor things to you that you’re likely to be interested in.”

The less work I have to do to mine data from the internet, the more I can do with my time and the richer  my life becomes.

It’s also worth noting that Microsoft and Yahoo! have openly put forward very sour grapes comments about Google Buzz, both of the giants stating that they have similar services that have existed for years! Well I hate to break it to you guys, but you should be hiding the fact that you’ve failed at making your services successful. Google Buzz is working: my Google contacts are already all over it.

This poor multitasking experience is currently holding back the mobile internet and the widespread usage of many applications. Sure you may have a twitter application on your phone already, but how long does it take you to stop what you are currently doing, open up twitter, send a tweet, close the application and get back to what you were doing before? The platform which is first to focus on multitasking and make it a central part of their OS will be the leader in the coming generation of phone applications. As existing tasks on smart phones become quicker to execute, it raises the bar on how much the average smart phone user can accomplish while on the go.

I have owned an Android phone for a little over a year now and I even have a bit of experience on the development side of the platform. I am going to discuss a couple of easy ways that Android could be changed to enable users to accomplish more with their devices. The cool thing about Android is that it is open source so it is actually possible to submit your own changes and have them pushed into a mod of the platform (such as Cyanogen), or possibly even the main commercial distribution.

Fast Task Switching

Pressing the HOME key on Android should immediately bring up a task switcher which switches between applications that the user is actively using. This would let users quickly move back and forth between their current tasks with a single button push!

Currently the HOME key takes you to the main screen of the phone where you can use widgets or launch another application. You CAN bring up a task switcher dialog by pressing and holding the home key for a few seconds but the menu that comes up is just a list of the six most recently used applications rather than just the ones you are actively using. I would argue that the main reason people press the HOME key is to change their current task and the function of the button should be changed to match.

Notification Profiles

An application can use many ways to get your attention when your phone is in your pocket or on the table. This includes playing sounds, flashing an LED, vibrating, and displaying icons on the screen. Android really needs a central notification system that manages how all applications alert you of events (i.e. text messages and emails). This system should be designed such that it automatically alerts you differently when you are at home, on the bus, at school, or at work. This can be accomplished by applying heuristics which take into account information such as the location and the orientation of your phone.

The problem is that with many applications (gmail, twitter, facebook, text messaging, phone calls, calendar alerts) raising events to to user, is that eventually it all becomes noise. To make things worse, you have to go into each application to change how it notifies you, making it almost impossible to customize how you get alerts when you move around. By hooking into a central framework the notification settings for all applications can be available in one convenient place. The result is that all of a sudden you want to use all of those applications that had previously just annoyed you with constant buzzing!

This idea could be extended so that the entire phone centers its user experience around locational heuristics, which is a great idea in theory but requires careful research and execution to be successful.

All smart phones will have to have good multitasking to be successful in the consumer market, so why not start working on it now?

The speaker during the banquet was an entertaining speaker named Sean Colt, from Thoora with a talk entitled, “Living in the Social Age and why we needed the promise of the Flying Car”. In the middle of his comedic delivery of interesting facts and ideas, he managed to drive home one point for me: in the age of the internet, open information, and linked data, your online presence is becoming really important. If someone looks you up online and comes up with nothing, then you won’t make an impression on them. So with all of our information going “online”, so should we.

I must admit, when the idea of blogs and social networking first popped into the landscape of internet media, I was first resistant to this change. I have been using the internet since back in 1995 when I was a mere 8 years old, and the demographic of the average internet user is much different now than it was in 1995. Back then I the internet wasn’t what I considered to be mainstream, but rather a niche thing that only me and my other nerdy friends knew about. I must admit when I first saw blogs, facebook, and twitter pop up I dismissed them as “trendy” things that “noobs” used. It’s become obvious that these things aren’t trendy, and are in fact here to stay.

I see the internet becoming more and more a user driven experience, where we all get to get up on our soap boxes and broadcast our opinions. In this sense you can think of the internet as a public interaction of many people talking amongst themselves. The set of social phenomena that we see in groups of people can now be applied in new and exciting ways to the internet. We all get to build it together, so if you haven’t done so already, you should think about hooking into the web and building your “Internet You”.