Buzz, Google’s controversial attempt to unseat Facebook as the most mainstream of social activity stream readers, just made some much-needed changes that Facebook could learn from as well.
Buzz users now have more granular control over what social interactions with content trigger an email sent to their email inboxes and explicit explanations for why each piece of content was sent by email to them. These changes are a good start but ought to extended into the body of Buzz as well …
If you’ve been on the Internet for long enough, you may remember the old UNIX finger command. With finger, you could just type in a command like finger email@yahoo.com and the email server would return more information about this person. Today, Google enabled the next generation of the finger command – WebFinger – for all Gmail accounts. WebFinger provides users with a standardized and decentralized way of sharing their profile and identity information online
Google began a small beta test of WebFinger in August 2009. Today, Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick announced that the company has now enabled WebFinger fall all Google accounts with public profiles.
Google Buzz could quickly become the most popular location-based service on the Internet. Not only does Buzz integrate itself into Gmail, which will give it a large mainstream user base, but Buzz also puts geolocation front and center on its mobile sites. In addition, the new Buzz layer in the Google Maps mobile interface makes it incredibly easy to find geotagged Buzz messages around you.
Twitter introduced its own geolocation API in August 2009, but very few users and developers actually use it today.
While location-based apps and services like Foursquare and Gowalla (which launched its own API today) have quickly grown in popularity, only 0.23% tweets currently include location data. Unlike Buzz, however, neither Twitter itself nor any of the popular Twitter client really put geolocation at the center of their applications …
