What exactly is Buzz? Google is great at building compelling products. They often struggle, however, on finding coherence between there offerings. Google Apps is a great example of them building a coherent solution around multiple applications (Gmail, Docs, Calendar, etc) for organizations. But for individuals the offerings are vast, and a little too unrelated.

What Buzz is attempting to do is to consolidate your various online “life streams” — Flickr or Picasa for your photos, YouTube for your videos, Google Reader shared items, blog posts — and aggregates them into one channel. Beyond the life streaming you can give the typical “what am I doing right now” status updates. Your buzzing (to use that as a verb) can be worldly accessible, or made private to a group defined in your Gmail contacts.

Isn’t this just like Facebook? Well, yes and no. Facebook is a platform. What I mean by that is Facebook wants to be your home for everything. Facebook wants to have your photos and videos, and for those things that don’t come from Facebook by default, there is an application ecosystem so you can play your games and take your silly surveys. But everything is wrapped into the Facebook platform, and you access everything through facebook.com.

Buzz, on the other hand, is more of an aggregator. Sure, you can give a status update just like Facebook. But Buzz’s strength begins when you tie in outside services like Flickr. My photos are in Flickr; that’s just where I prefer to have them. Trying to get those into Facebook, through a Facebook application, is kludge at best. With Buzz, when it sees that I have new photos it creates a new “buzzlet” (buzz dropping?) automagically. It takes wrangling to get outside blog posts into Facebook, where Buzz will pull it in for me. Facebook wants to be the “one platform to rule them all,” where Buzz wants to bring things together from disparate places on the web into a single stream.

Isn’t this just like Twitter? I think Twitter and Buzz is a more similar comparison than Facebook and Buzz. Twitter is great for giving status updates, but can be challenging to follow the flow of conversation amongst the barrage of tweets. I’ve been using Twitter for three years now, and I find value in using it. Historically Twitter has been mobile friendly in the text messaging context, hence its 140 character limit. More recently they are expanding into mobile web, but the text message functionality is still available.

That said, to pull in life streams you have to rely on outside services. There are a bevy of blog plugins that will notify Twitter when a blog is updated. You can use a third party service to consume RSS feeds of blogs, Flickr, etc. and have that posted to your Twitter feed. With Buzz, that is all right there. No working with outside services. And as with many Google offerings, there is a really nice mobile web version of the application. No sign of a text messaging option, though.

Isn’t this just like FriendFeed? “What is FriendFeed,” you might ask. FriendFeed has been around for a while, and was recently purchased by Facebook. FriendFeed will aggregate data from 58 different types of services into a common feed. This includes well known sites like Digg, Delicious, Pandora, Twitter, and Flickr to more niche web sites/services like LibraryThing. I have a FriendFeed account, but I hardly ever use it.

Out of all the comparisons I’ve made or seen done by others, Buzz to me resembles FriendFeed more than any other service. The thing that I believe will make a difference is that Buzz is integrated into Gmail. Immediately Google has millions of Buzz users. And to top it off, I don’t have to go visit yet another web site. I’m always in my Gmail. I always found FriendFeed to be another tab to be opened, and never really got into it primarily because it was somewhere else I had to be online.

Isn’t this just like email? This is a valid question, primarily because when the Buzz threads you are a part of — someone comments on your buzz, or another comment on a buzz you previously commented on — when those threads are updated you receive an email in your Gmail inbox. Talk about inbox overload. This Lifehacker post shows you how to “turn off” that “feature.” You can also “mute” a post if you do not want to be notified about further comments on that post. To do that you click on the Comment dropdown on the top-right corner of said post, and choose “Mute this post.”

But no, Buzz is no more email than Google Talk (integrated into Gmail, too) is email. The main differentiator between Buzz and email is the public nature of it. Kinda like the difference between a message to a specific person on Facebook and a status update on Facebook. Your message (i.e. email) is to a specific person/group of people. Your status update is to all your friends. And just like Facebook status updates, people can comment on your update.

Do I have to use Buzz? No, you can turn Buzz off. If you go to your Gmail inbox, at the next-to-last line you will see a link that says “turn off buzz.” Click that link, and it is gone.

Final Thoughts: I think Buzz is promising. I always liked the idea of FriendFeed, but didn’t like having to be yet another place. I like that it is tied into Gmail. I wish there was some flexibility within the system, and I wish I could add more services (e.g. Digg, Lala). I have to give it some credit, though, since it has only been out for only 1+ day at this point. It is a brand new service by Google, and has been given a very prominent position within Gmail. Google will not let it flounder.

I think Apple set out to upscale the iPod touch. Obviously the iPad is physically much larger than the iPod touch, so the upscaled hardware was achieved. The second aspect of it is the upscaled software, which is not as easily achieved. Sure, they could have gone the easy route of just “super sizing” your typical iPhone applications — which they are doing with all iPhone apps as an easy way to port iPhone apps to iPad — but they have re-conceived the iPhone OS for the larger display.

I think Apple set out to crush the eBook market. Why would I pay $489 for a Kindle DX when I can spend $10 more to get an iPad? The screen size is the same, and they both have bookstores attached to them with wireless distribution. And that’s about where the similarities stop. And unlike the Kindle, the iPad supports the “free and open” ePub book format.

I think those disappointed because they expected this to be a laptop killer are kidding themselves. If you really wanted a “true” OS X tablet you should have purchased a Modbook by now. Why would Apple, or any company, want to steal customers from themselves? Getting customers to buy a laptop-replacing tablet rather than a more expensive system is ludicrous.

What they have done is created a desktop supporting product. You have your desktop computer (your choice between the Mac Mini, iMac, or Mac Pro of course), and an iPad for mobile support. I’d love to have a beefy Mac Pro under my desk, and an iPad to take to meetings. I already take my iPod touch to meetings, and the iPad would actually be easier to take notes on.

It’s not all roses from me, however. I do wish it had a camera on the bezel for video chat. I really wish they would have introduced running multiple apps simultaneously. Really wish they would have done that.

There is a lot more I could say, but this is enough for now. Anyway, I won’t have any sense of it until I actually use one. Perhaps I’ll have to go grab the latest SDK and give the virtual iPad a go.

If you don’t know, as of today, Facebook will automatically index all your info on Google, which allows everyone to view it. To change this option, go to Settings –> Privacy Settings –> Search –> then UN-CLICK the box that says ‘Allow indexing’

I immediately went and checked out my own settings. Sure enough, my default Public Search Results box was checked to allow indexing. What caught my eye was the descriptive text below that check box.

Allow search engines to access your publicly available info and any information visible to Everyone

What this is saying is the data you have already made accessible to the world can (read: will) be indexed by Google. Sure, you can uncheck the box, and Google (and Bing and Yahoo! and anyone else) will not index your world-accessible, fully public data.

IMHO that’s a false veil of privacy. If you really want to know the data that will be indexed you can navigate to the same privacy settings page, and click the Preview My Profile button. I hadn’t seen this button before, but it is a really nice tool.

The initial view is your public view; it is what the world sees when they load up your Facebook profile. This is the data that would be indexible by third parties such as Google and Microsoft. But, it also gives you the ability to type in the name of a Facebook friend, and it shows you what they can see on your profile page. This preview tool allows you the ability to see how your privacy settings affect your profile page, and the data that people (Fb friends or not) can see.

Quick summary: unchecking this box is not securing your profile. It only keeps Google et al from indexing it into their search results. Random strangers will still be able to view your public profile. My advice, use the “Preview My Profile” tool to tune your public profile to where you are comfortable with the information given; all the way down to nothing if that is what you desire. Facebook is only doing what you have setup your privacy to be; if anything is marked as available to Everyone, they are making it available to everyone.

Caveat emptor.

Update – I don’t want this to sound like I’m anti-security. I’m all for security; privacy is a very important thing. I just don’t like the Jump To Conclusions Mat of “[insert company] is evil! They are sharing my data!” when you have specifically allowed them to share it. We need to take a step back and really evaluate what is, or isn’t, happening on our behalf. Then, take appropriate action to secure your data as you see fit.

Like I said earlier, there are more things to post on twitter than your current status. I’ve read post links to all kinds of interesting articles. I’ve seen people ask questions. I’ve seen people provide answers. People share what’s going on at events in real time. One thing I learned early on is that some folks are only interested in trying to get something from others on Twitter. But there are quite a few people who are there to add value to others. In doing so, they find that there is value added to them. I’m trying to be one of the voices on Twitter that adds something meaningful and fun to the conversation.

So, if you have been wondering about Twitter, give his post a read. Once you sign up you can find me @jschwanz.

Obama Facebook Ad

Originally uploaded by jschwanz

I’ve seen this pay-per-click advertisement on Facebook a handful of times over the last couple of days. All I have to say is his campaign understands new media very well.

A few months ago Sarah stopped by my office at work, and we had a great catch-up conversation (she lives in Boise and does missions work, so we only see each other once or twice a year). She made a comment about how she reads Aj’s blogs frequently, but mine only once in a while. The reason: I write mostly about tech stuff and not so much about family and life. I have to admit that there is definite truth to that.

In the months following that conversation I thought about that one statement, wondering what (if anything) I would do in response to it. I eventually decided to take a similar path as two people I interact with daily, Bren and my wife. Bren has a personal blog and a business blog. Aj has a personal/mama blog and a religious/Quaker thought blog. I now have my personal blog (this is it) and a tech blog.

Sarah — I’ll be putting my tech content elsewhere from now on, so don’t ignore this too much

Stay tuned here for more stuff about normal life, Judah news, and Half Pint news. And of course the photos and videos. If you like the tech stuff, join me over at TechJive, too.

[tags]multi-touch screen, Jeff Han, Apple iPhone[/tags]

via AppleInsider

[tags]The Beatles, iPod, iTunes[/tags]

Variety [via SilverMac]

[tags]VHS[/tags]