Google is in the air this morning! People talking about what tag to use for the event.

10:03: Event hasn’t started yet. I spotted Vic Gundotra (VP Engineering) in the room about 20 minutes ago, but he is gone now.

10:09: The event hasn’t started yet. There are 27 slides in the presentation. Starting in a few minutes, waiting for a “few people who are still stuck in traffic.”

10:14: Started – Bradley Horowitz up on stage.

10:17: Talking about real time and sharing and to manage attention better (hint – Twitter)

10:18: Getting to Yahoo’s history and the early search engines. There was no relevance. Then came Google!

10:19: When you have 500 or 5000 friends to manage the content. TMI (Too Much Information). The social network per user will grow. This has become a large scale relevance problem.

10:20: Launched Google Buzz!

10:22: 5 features

1) Auto following

2) Rich, fast sharing experience

3) Public and private sharing

4) Inbox integration

5) Just the good stuff (filtered content + content discovery)

10:26: Demoing Google Buzz, has a cool photo viewing and embeded videos.

10:27: Link sharing is copied from Facebook. Also supports gmail shortcuts.

10:28: You can use existing Gmail groups for private sharing. Todd Jackson mentions that it was difficult to use on “other websites”

10:29: Coments come in real-time in the inbox. Best Buzz gets to your inbox. They also have ‘@’ replies in the comments.

10:32: Demoing Recommended Buzz. If a lot of your friends liking or commenting it, Google will recommend it. You can say ‘Not Interested’ and recommendation engine will learn over time.

10:35: Vic Gundatra going to talk about Google Buzz in mobile.

10:36: Talking about location as a signal.

10:38: Google has mapped lat-long with locations.

10:39: Google.com brand new mobile homepage. There is a buzz icon on top right. It finds your location (like foursquare)

10:40: Buzz app will be availabe on buzz.google.com. Google Buzz will be mashed up with Google Map. There is a tab “Near By”. Google will find the most interesting buzz around you.

10:45: Google Maps app has buzz layer. You can post buzz using Google map app. There are white conversation bubbles in the maps app showing nearby buzzes which are geo tagged.

10:50: Google Buzz will be part of google apps, but not in V1. Buzz will start launching in 9.5 minutes. I will have screenshots as soon as possible. For rest of the world, it will be launched in next few days.

10:52: Sergey Brin on stage with Vic Gundutra, Todd Jackson and Bradley Horowitz.

10:53: There are privacy settings built into the Buzz. There are possibilities to integrate with Wave.

10:54: The system will be very open, it will support pubhubsubbub as of today. They will launch more APIs in coming months.

10:56: Sergey talking about Orkut’s success in the geographies it is popular.

11:00: You can connect external websites-services to pull in data into Buzz. You can’t yet post to twitter, but they plan to add the feature.

11:03:  Buzz will use gmail’s spam filters and google.com’s scoring algorithms to score buzzes.

11:04: Google Buzz is launched at buzz.google.com. My account hasn’t got the access yet.

Google Buzz

There are a handful of good conferences on SEO through out the year. They not only provide an opportunity to meet  other industry experts face to face, but also to gain insight into future trends. SEOs discuss their problems about search engine optimization and the business side of it. These discussions raise a lot of good questions and diverse set of solutions from other SEOs. I will be representing Think Mantra at both the upcoming major conferences – SES San Jose (Aug11 – 13) and PubCon Vegas (Nov 10 – 13).

Search Engine Strategies San Jose has a great line up of sessions in its 11th year of existence. I will be live blogging for SEO Roundtable for some of the sessions spread out across all 3 days. I am looking forward to sessions on Creating a Web Analytics Culture, Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers and a few others in particular. The speakers for the sessions are experienced professionals.

PubCon Las Vegas is another great conference not just because it is in Vegas, but due to the diversity of the attendees. If you are planning to attend it, note that the pricing on the conference increases as it gets closer. The “official” hotel is Treasure Island and JetBlue is giving out 5% discount to the attendees. However, I found out that Virgin America is the best and cheapest airline to fly to the conferece from San Francisco.

If you are planning to be at either of these events (even for exhibit hall) leave a comment here and we can schedule for a short meet to connect and know more about each other.

Happy Optimizing the web!

Think Mantra Launch

I am happy to announce the launch of Think Mantra, Inc. Think Mantra is an SEO company located in Mountain View, the heart of silicon valley, which helps local businesses to achieve their search engine reach goals. We are passionate about search engine optimization, web standards and analytics.

Think Mantra’s team helped multiple venture backed companies to get higher targetted traffic and increase in conversion rates. I am confident that the team will carry forward the work and yield even better results for our clients.