Google aims to cut down noise with Buzz

As was announced yesterday, Google introduced a new product today for GMailers to cut down on social media “noise.”

“The stream of messages has become a torrent,” said Bradley Horowitz, a vice president of product development at Google. “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.”

Google Buzz seems to have some similarities to Wave- in fact, it almost kind of feels like Wave isn’t catching on as quickly as Google might have hoped and they’re pushing it into our GMail boxes. The features look nice, and the intregration of some features we’ve grown accustomed to from other services (like @ replies to contacts) is handy. But as someone who has difficulty shoveling through the massive amount of information dumped into my inbox on a daily basis, I’m having difficulty drumming up excitement for a product that’s pushing more information into my eyes.

Videos, photos and other shared content can be viewed inline, which is a great feature. And though shared information can be public or private, the autofollow feature sounds like it might just result in more unread emails. One of the most derided aspects of Facebook is awkwardness when algorithms tell you who to friend or information leaks before you realize it- a classic example being an embarrassing tagged photo.

Another perhaps-too-clever aspect of Buzz is geotagging- posts are geotagged, the service integrates with Google Maps, and you can see what people local to you are “buzzing” about. If you’ve been caught out by becoming “mayor” of an all night diner via a unrealized Twitter update at 4:45 in the morning, you know why this is slightly unnerving. But again, this could be something we all can’t live without in six weeks.

Integration with sites like Picasa, Flickr, Twitter and Google Reader are also part of the Buzz experience, enabling users to flip through content in their GMail tab. Aggregating that kind of content may well prove to be very useful to users that trudge through vast quantities of information each day. Buzz has been rolled out to about 1% of users today, and should be in everyone’s GMail inboxes by some time next week. If you can’t wait, you can take a look over at buzz.google.com. Video below is a quick breakdown of the new service.