Google Buzz, the latest roll out from Google, has become the center of all discussions at the moment. Buzz takes Google into the world of social-networking technology. Buzz is a combination of good ideas, and bad realization and it calls for more refinement so as to be a strong competitor in the world of Facebook and Twitter.

You would get stumbled on Buzz by logging into your Gmail account. There you get to discover a folder named ‘Buzz’ just below the inbox. You just have to click on it get things progressing. Almost all of the browsers are found to work with Buzz. Buzz works as a generic feed, where you will be able to post text, multimedia or links.

Posting a photograph can be done by either uploading the picture straight from the browser or choosing a file in your Picasa account. Buzz automatically detects when a link with a URL in it is placed into your feed and tries to draw pictures from the linked page, which you can then incorporate for context. You can choose to follow others or they can opt to follow you, by including names from a public Google profile or from their/your Google contact list.

People can track your Buzz feeds immediately without the need that you friend them back, but then, you are notified when that occurs and can then select to “unfollow” them at anytime you desire. You can post to the common public where in it acts a bit like Twitter. Following is also not that flexible. Options to filter or group incoming updates are not seen in it at present, but you can selectively mute them. You cannot follow anyone with profile other than a Google profile.

The most useful part about Buzz is the way it works as an activity aggregator. Whatever stuff you post on Google Chat, Flickr, YouTube, Picasa or Twitter can be automatically guided into Buzz. You can manage sites through webmaster tools in your Google account with which you can tap feeds from those sites as well. There is some extent of privacy control for all of this.

Individual post can be marked as private or public. If it is made private, your feeds will be shown only to your contacts list in Gmail. You can also select not to feed a particular site into Buzz at all.

Buzz does have some problematic areas as well. The privacy protection features offered by it is not so broad, up till now. Another matter with Buzz is its forced integration with Gmail. It also seems difficult to decipher. Many of the functions and settings in Buzz are either not yet accessible or buried. Another issue with Buzz is that it has no API compatibility with Twitter or Facebook and it does not work with Facebook at all.