This morning, Google is hosting an event at its Mountain View, CA headquarters to show off a new social product it has been working on. Google VP of Product Management Bradley Horowitz, VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra, and product manager Todd Jackson are on hand to show it off.
Below, follow our live notes (paraphrased):
They?ve announced it will start in a few minutes, waiting for people in traffic, etc?
Horowitz: Exciting news to share this morning. This is exactly the right audience. Next 45 minutes to hour we?re going to be showing off something. I bet many of you are live-blogging this. That?s not really realtime cause I can talk faster than you can type. We?ll be talking about that. It shouldn?t be so much work to find the right audience for content you want to share. The moments of our life is the most precious time we have. We want tools to manage it better. Let?s take a walk through time and space.
Several years ago a couple of Yahoos thought they could organize the web. Soon they hired up 10,000 people to organize content. Then come algorithmic search engines. But it was still pretty bad. There was no relevance. It was still really hard to find things. 5 Years later came Google. We?re seeing the same thing with social sites now. But it?s even hard to find value cause there is too much noise. When you have 500 or 5,000 friends it?s very difficult. TMI, oversharing. There are lots of ways to define friends ? that?s how you can have 5,000. And this will continue growing, and the problem will get worse and worse.
This is a large scale problem. A relevance problem. We like these kinds of problems. It?s like when we launched Gmail. Today it?s Google Buzz we?re launching. A Google approach to sharing.
Jackson: I?m really excited to show you what Buzz looks like built into Gmail. We started 5 years ago with our new approach to Gmail. First we grouped conversations. Then we added chat. Then we added video chat. Today will Google Buzz, we have a new way to share and communicate inside of Gmail. It?s a new world. I?ll focus on 5 key features.
1) Auto-following. We didn?t want users to have to peck out a totally new social graph. There has always been a giant social network under Gmail. You auto-follow the people you email and chat with the most.
2) Rich, fast sharing experience. Same nice Gmail UI and keyboard shortcuts. Special attention to media.
3) Public and private sharing. We want things Google can index, but also private messages.
4) Inbox integration. The inbox is the center for communication.
5) Just the good stuff. Some much social data, we need to filter the noise.