Google's Gmail Adds Social Networking Features

Twitter-esque feed aggregates from Flickr, YouTube
By Nick McMaster,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 9, 2010 3:04 PM CST
Google's Gmail Adds Social Networking Features

Google rolled out "Buzz" today, its social-networking add-on to Gmail. The feature essentially turns the Gchat feature into a real-time social news feed, allowing users to follow the people they most frequently email or chat with and integrating information with Flickr, Picasaweb, YouTube, and Twitter. Buzz also has a mobile component—it dovetails with an app for Android phones and the iPhone that tags your updates with GPS data, allowing you to see what friends nearby are saying, Mashable reports.

“The stream of social messages has become a torrent,” said a Google VP. “There is no way to parse that amount of information that ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime. We think this has become a Google-scale problem.” (More Google stories.)

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