Google Buzz is easily the boldest attempt yet to build a social network by Google. Imagine taking elements of Twitter, Yammer, Foursquare, Yelp, and other social services, and shoving them together into one package.
Now imagine covering that package in a layer that looks a lot like FriendFeed. Now imagine shoving that package inside of Gmail. That’s Buzz.
Google Buzz
Google Buzz for Mobile
Sounds overwhelming but can’t wait to give it a go.
I’ve just opened up Picasa for the first time in ages.
First thing I noticed was how lightening fast it is compared to iPhoto. It’s blazing!! But just scanning through the photos I noticed a small red pin next to images I’d taken with my iPhone.
Turn outs that Picasa now has a ‘Places Panel’ which uses Geotagging data to show where your photo was taken. Picasa will write the longitude and latitude to the photo’s EXIF metadata. You can also view the data (GPS Latitude and Longitude) of a geotagged image in Picasa by selecting Properties.
Last week Gizmodo spotted that Google has filed a patent entitled “Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising,” which in short allows them to paste media (adverts) onto the images.
Its interesting how the mouse in Street View follows the 3D space, we assume to allow any data to be tagged to buildings etc.
With data of course comes the ability to provide click throughs and advertising. We dont think it will limited to simple images however as video can also be embedded into panoramas as one of our previous examples shows.
I don’t know exactly when it happened but it’s just dawned on me. I’m sat here doing a bit of work using Google Docs, working/sharing files with Dropbox. I’ve started using the Cloud.
I don’t use Docs for work yet, but for personal stuff it’s great.
I all over it for Docs and Spreadsheets but avoid the Powerpoint / Keynote side – its not feature rich enough yet.
Dropbox has become an installation essential for me. Bascially it’s what .Mac should have been. The big difference is that you get a folder on your local drive which is kept in sync with the cloud – meaning you have online/offline access to all the files.
It can also ACTUALLY handle large files (which .Mac is absolutely shambolic at), it gives you progress feedback, and doesn’t cause your machine to freeze up. Love it.
There’s also a web interface too which is dead easy to use.
You’re all familiar with Google Street View and the camera-topped Google Car – but what about all of the interesting places inaccessible to cars?
Enter the Google Trike, which started as a project by Daniel Ratner, a Senior Mechanical Engineer on the Street View team:
“I began thinking about building a bicycle-based Street View system after realizing how many interesting places around the world – ranging from historic landmarks to beautiful trails to shopping districts – aren’t accessible by car,” says Dan. “When I’m riding the trike, so many people come up to me and ask where it’s off to next or how they can get imagery of their favorite spot, so I can’t wait to see what our users come up with.”
Google’s Street View trike lets us take pictures of places that are not accessible by car.
As clicks on banners diminish, the challenge for agencies is to find new and interesting ways of engaging people in their different spaces. Recently there’s been a definite move towards taking an application / service and wrapping a creative experience around it.
I’ve picked out 3 new(ish) bits that I’ve spotted… all using services provided by Google.
1 – Google Wave
Launched on a wave of hype (geddit), with people scrambling on Twitter to get invites. Google Wave is meant to be a gamechanger. I got an invite. It’s not that great with only 5 people to talk to.
To show off the potential power of Wave – Joe Sabia (a person who may have a bit too much time on his hands) recreated Samuel L Jacksons’ epic Ezekiel 25:17 speech from Pulp Fiction.
Next up is a nice hack of Google Maps. The Editors created a microsite where you whizz around London finding places of interest to them, unlocking content from the new album as you go along.
This kind of stuff used to be mindblowing but there were some interesting comments on Adverblog about it.
I very much like the idea of integrating real and virtual life. But to be honest, my feeling about this execution is “smart, cool, well done” but not “wow” in the sense that this kind of wise approach to digital tools should be the norm (and maybe it’s beginning to be the norm) and not the “wow” exception. What do you think?
I feel the same way. Nicely done, enjoyable, but lacks some of the wow.
However since 14th October, when the campaign went live, 35,000 people have engaged with the app. What’s more, each visitor has spent an average three and a half minutes interacting with it, dipping in and out of an average number of three tracks.
As Google continues to try and monetise YouTube, opportunities to do something a bit different are popping up regularly. To highlight what’s possible Google Creative Labs send out a doc called 87 Cool Things.
Spend some time looking through this. It’s bound to trigger some ideas:
