I Have Google Buzz Now, Apparently

So…yeah, I guess I’m on Google Buzz. It’s linked to my Picasa and Wordpress accounts, so you can follow everything I do. Cause that’s not creepy or anything. The best part is that the defaults for everything are public, and you end up broadcasting to a bunch of random people unless you sit down and sort through. I’m expecting this to backfire for a bunch of people, and not just eventually but almost immediately. It might not be a bad idea to start a betting pool on when the first child porn charges are filed as some highschool student accidentally sends herself to the entire school.

At this point, I imagine most of you are wondering, what the hell is Google Buzz? That’s pretty much what I said when my Gmail offered it to me. Basically, Buzz is a shot across the bow of Facebook, by attempting to integrate multiple services into a streaming feed as part of Gmail, pretty much like the Facebook homepage. Photos come from Picasa, links from Reader, and you can share stuff right in the page too. You have Buzz simply by virtue of having a Google account, although the service is still in the process of rolling out. Since that covers pretty much everyone with an internet connection (and then some), it’s a huge social network under construction.

As for how it competes with Facebook…it’s different. I like Facebook more so far because I can tag arbitrary parts of photos. Picasa makes me use face recognition, which is bullshit. But to be honest, Facebook annoys me. So I’m more likely to use Buzz as another platform to advertise SlimDX and SlimTune, same as I did with Twitter. (And then got bored of.)

Oh, and you better believe they will advertise based on what’s going on in your Buzz network.

[UPDATE] Called it.