If you have a gmail account, you’ve probably already encountered Google Buzz and maybe even set it up and used it a little. Astonishingly easy to get started with, it looks like a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter, and can be integrated with Twitter, blogs set up on blogspot.com, Google Reader, Google chat status, YouTube, Picasa, and Flickr. Those that you choose to integrate into Buzz will be updated by, or can share information with Buzz.
What may end up setting Buzz apart from the others, however, is the geographical information that can be associated with Buzzes that originate from your mobile phone. If you happen to see a celebrity, say and wanted to share a picture you snapped with your Droid or iPhone, you could do it, and use Google Maps to give it a geographical tag.
It could potentially be an alibi killer as well. If you were to tell your spouse or the police you were at a certain place at a certain time, and someone had photographed you and geo tagged you at another place and another time, you could be totally busted. But with the exception of the geo tagging option, this isn’t that much more of an alibi buster than a regular camera phone with a date and time stamp.
Google has taken some flack for just how wide open the Buzz platform is, and it has already tightened some of the privacy settings. But it will take a little time to find out just how many novel uses this new platform can be put to.