At a live press event at its Mountain View, CA headquarters on the morning of February 9, 2010, Google announced its latest foray into Social Media - Google Buzz. Bradley Horowitz, Google's VP of Product Marketing opened the event by describing Google Buzz as "a Google approach to sharing." Google Buzz incorporates many features of popular social media sites like status updates (Twitter, Facebook), location-based updates (Foursquare, Yelp), and de facto ratings for updates via "likes" and comments (Digg, Facebook).

Todd Jackson, Product Manager for Google Buzz explained that the new service, to be "built directly into Gmail," will easily allow you to locate people you might be interested in by "auto-following" the Gmail contacts who you e-mail and chat with most often. He also described how Google Buzz will be able to aggregate updates those people generate in other social media services whether or not you have have an account there.

When you create an update, you have the option of making it "public" (available to all your followers, posted to your Google Profile, and available in Google Web search) or "private" (sent to select contacts in your Gmail Contact list). Any Gmail user who comes across a public update on your public Profile can comment on that update, whether they're following you or not. The comments are listed below your original update similar to Facebook status updates. At the outset, the default for updates is public. However, if you send a private update, subsequent updates will be private until you change this setting.

Google Buzz includes promises close integration with other Google services like Picasa and Blogger and with non-Google sites like Flickr and Twitter. This includes the ability to "automatically pull headlines and photos from links that you post," similar to Link updates in Facebook. The integration with Twitter entails pulling in all of your public Tweets as Google Buzz updates.

While the service will roll-out to Gmail users over the next few days, Vic Gundotra, Google's VP of Engineering, discussed the mobile version which is available immediately for Nokia, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Android phones. A Web-based app is also available to iPhone and Android phone users - by pointing their Web browsers to http://buzz.google.com. Updates can be created in the mobile version either by typing or speaking (using the Google Voice Shortcut).

With the announcement of Google Buzz, comes a new Buzz layer to Google Maps. The mobile version of Google Buzz incorporates the phones' GPS capabilities to add geographic information (geo-location) to updates sent from the app. The mobile version of Google Buzz allows you to view updates from people you're following or to see location-based updates sent "nearby" your current location displayed on Google Maps as "talk bubble" icons (similar to those in comic strips). They're readable by clicking on the icon.

One limitation we noted in our (previously) limited access to the mobile edition, was the inability to opt out of receiving subsequent comments to a Buzz update we had commented on previously. (Once we commented on a Buzz update, we received threaded updates in our Gmail box each time someone else commented on that update.) This issue is resolved in the Gmail-based version of Google Buzz by selecting Mute this conversation from the drop-down menu next to the Comment link on the right-hand side of the update.

Similarly, the browser-based version of Google Buzz includes another of the features we commented on wanting in the mobile version.  In the web-based version, when you set an update to private, the options to whom you do share the update include the groups you'd previously established in Gmail, any individual Gmail contact or follower to whom to send an update (ala Twitter's Direct Message) or multiple Gmail contacts or followers (ala CCs on an e-mail). (After selecting Private from the drop-down menu, select one of your existing Gmail groups or click Create a new group to select individual or multiple contacs to whom you want to send this particular update. Your group will also be saved for the future.)

In addition to the consumer versions of Google Buzz, Google promises a business version in the near future.

CBS News/C|net technology correspondent Larry Magid has raised a number of interesting privacy concerns. Digg and WeFollow founder Kevin Rose and RSS creator Dave Winer pose different sets of concerns in their own blog posts.

In addition to the live announcement event, Google has posted an announcement to its blog and a demo/descriptive video at on YouTube.