Web Forum: Internet news

Feb 19 2010 by Andrew Jackson, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

GOT the Buzz yet? If you’ve got a Google account you probably have. Although, you might not realise it.

Buzz – www.google.com/buzz – is Google’s latest big idea. It’s a bit like Facebook, but inside your email. It does many of the things that Facebook does – and does them fast. It lets you share stuff with everyone you know via Gmail and with everyone else in the world via the web. It’s a very exciting idea.

If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Only a few months ago Google announced something that did the same sort of job. It was called Google Wave – wave.google.com.

Wave was strictly for invitees-only. Invitations were few and far between and internet users were clamouring to get their hands on them.

The Buzz launch couldn’t be more different. Buzz has been added to almost every Gmail account in the world – and almost overnight.

Buzz works like Facebook in that you are connected to people you know. Google assumes that you’ll want to be connected to the people you’ve swapped emails with in the past so it automatically creates a list of connections for you. So that’s one tedious job you don’t have to do.

What can you do with Buzz? Share photos, links, videos, all that stuff. Have conversations. Everything appears inside your Gmail account and is automatically archived on the web (unless you start a conversation and flag it as private).

What’s interesting is that everything you do on Buzz appears on your Google Profile page – which effectively becomes a Buzz-powered blog.

Buzz ends up being a kind of glue – grabbing all the web stuff you do with Google and sticking it together in one place.

BIG CHANGE AT BLOGGER

If you’re a long-time user of Blogger (www.blogger.com) you need to know that the service will stop supporting FTP updates at the end of March. FTP is an internet technology that’s older than the World Wide Web and has always been an option to Blogger users who wanted to use it to send their web pages to web servers they controlled. But for the Blogger technical team it’s a pain to support so they’re phasing it out. To find out more, go see the official FTP Info blog at blogger-ftp.blogspot.com.

THING OF THE WEEK

Rhett and Link’s T-shirt war: rhettandlink.com/blog/t-shirt-war/ – Giles Turnbull has a website at gilest.org