Web buzzed yesterday with talk about Google Buzz. A lot of people I know have already got Google Buzz. If you haven’t, check out this write up by RWW.

Google Buzz has a feature called ‘image viewer’. In the demo it was showed that the image viewer fetches image from external sources Picasa and Flickr and display the images in full size within Google Buzz. I with others was concerned that Google might be pulling off images from ANY webpage instead of just Picasa and Flickr. This would not help websites with a lot of images as Google will ‘steal’ their traffic. I tested this with a few different websites and found that this is not the case with websites other than Picasa and Flickr.

Another thing I noticed that there are 2 ways to add links to GBuzz. One of the way is better than the other because it provides leverage with the anchor text. Surprisingly I did not see ‘nofollow’ attribute on Google profiles for the links shared using Google Buzz. I haven’t looked deep into it but if it is true, it will be helpful with SEO. Checkout the video below for a demo of how to add the link.

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