San Francisco — Here comes Buzz again! Now as the dust has settled after Google’s horrible PR misadventure with the release of social-networking feature “Google Buzz,” the search engine leader has announced the addition of a read-only Buzz layer in Google Maps yesterday.
Google Buzz — a shot toward other web heavy-hitters Facebook and Twitter – unveiled earlier this year as a ready-to-go attachment to Gmail, but the search guru has now upped the ante by integrating it into its widely used maps service.
A few screen shots below from Google Maps with Buzz switched on to give you an idea of how easy it is to track someone’s location and latest meanderings via the site.
Buzz, released in February, arrived much to the apathy of critics and users, who said there was not much new to the service.
“Google has taken a smattering of good ideas from a number of popular services and attempted to combine them in a way that meshes well with the Gmail experience,” Ryan Paul wrote at the time for Ars Technica. “The end result is a service that shows promise but lacks the requisite killer feature or innovative twist that it will need in order to truly keep people engaged.”
It can now be accessed from the “More” button located in the top right-hand corner of the map interface that resides between the “Traffic” and “Map” buttons on the map face.
Google Buzz is a new layer on Google Maps. (Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)
“Find a fascinating area like your neighborhood and select any available icon to see what is going on there. In the post’s window, click on the name to see the author’s public profile, the timestamp to comment on the post, or the place to see it in Maps,” said Google software expert Ana Ulin and Evan Parker in a joint blog post.
Mountain View is pushing Buzz via its Google Maps extension that allows users to alert the virtual world as to not only what is on their mind, through the service’s standard status/microblogging function and Twitter collation, but also share their global position as well.
While it will certainly be railed against by proponents of web privacy, the feature does, however, imbue Google’s social media arm with something other services, such as Twitter and Facebook, do not have. The Chocolate Factory has approached this particular strategic Buzz play with an element of caution by making the feature read-only from the desktop, presumably while the company continues to lick its wounds over the privacy howler it made at launch of the product, which was bolted onto Gmail without Google consulting its users first.