Jaunted

The content sharing stuff really is kind of meh. There's a friends list of course. But all social networks have friend lists, and we're not sure we want everyone in our contact list as a friend anyway. You can share content from Google properties places like Picasa and YouTube. But you can already do that in Facebook, while Google Buzz doesn't integrate the other way and grab Facebook content. All Google Buzz updates are baked right into a new Gmail tab. But we already get the Facebook and Twitter updates we want emailed to us, so this might be more of a distraction than a boon.

Admittedly the company is doing some kind of neat stuff with searching and prioritizing friend-of-friend content. It looks like they're piggybacking on the social search technology that they've been building for Google itself, where they try to guess what's relevant for you by peeking into what your friends and friends-of-friends are saying. But that's a feature that's far more useful when your're searching for information from people we trust. We're not particularly interested in what friends-of-friends have to say about random topics, and we really don't want to know they're having for lunch. Really.

The mobile half of Google Buzz, on the other hand, has the potential to be really interesting. Point your phone to the site, give it permission to access your Google Account, and you'll instantly be logged into the service. The first thing that happens is you get mobile access to your friends list, so you can get the "Buzz" from everyone you're are following. Again that's par for the course for any social networking mobile app.

But there's a second tab—"Nearby"—that lets you tap into the public stream and see what everyone in the area is saying. The potential is endless. Restaurant reviews, flight updates specific to the airport you're in, crowd-sourced events...a location-awareness bonanza.

This has the potential to trump Jaunted favorite Foursquare, if only because Google Buzz users automatically start with a much larger contact list. There's even a Buzz layer for Google Maps, where people can produce reviews and attach them to specific places, but then it doesn't have the addictive gaming element of Foursquare.

If all that sounds a little complicated, Google has helpfully put out a video:

The social networking features promise to allow people to wander around cities and discover what's happening in their immediate area. The Google Maps layer will do that plus act as a de facto review clearinghouse. Given all our excitement, we were totally unsurprised to find that Google Buzz's mobile features are the least developed part of the service as of today. But fingers crossed!

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