Sitting outside of our public lab, I’ve been witness to the horrors of low cost printing. 500 page pdf? Print it out! Powerpoint? Print it out! Need to turn in a paper? Print it out! “The printer’s not printing my 500 page pdf? Why isn’t this a duplex printer? Don’t you realize that you are killing trees?”

I’m beginning to think a large piece of our curriculum is printing out articles and bringing them to class. Notice I didn’t say read the article.

Anyway, back to buzz.

A few years ago, when 3G was brand spanking new in Denver, the Helio phone (remember them?) peaked my interest, simply because of a one of its features: a GPS-find-your-friends-on-Google-Maps. This only worked if your friends were using a Helio phone. Helio never could gain traction, Cricket and Boost taking most of their low priced all inclusive features.

Fast forward a couple of years, what has happened in the mainstream? Iphones and Android based devices are gaining market share (with GPS and data becoming ubiquitous). Now there’s a need for location based services!

Latitude was the first salvo. Where where the privacy pundits when this came out? Oh, it uses a term that probably most people couldn’t define, so it gets unnoticed. Using Latitude (on the iPod), I noticed how it it quickly replaced my use of the Google Maps app. It was snappy, useful, and took advantage of the WebUI development platform. Latitude allowed me to integrate geobased info into my other Google services very easily.

Which brings us back to Buzz. Sure, Buzz didn’t seem like that big of a deal when I first tried it this past week. There was an additional label within Gmail (yawn). Big deal. Then I saw the light (the mobile light).

The Buzz mobile interface is quite nice. I clicked on the buzz around me, then I noticed a dozens of buzz (or tweets, etc..) geo-based in my neighborhood! Buzz is not a twitter-killer. Its another piece of the puzzle.

What’s more likely to happen? Users leaving facebook and twitter or leaving Gmail? Yup.

This isn’t a US thing, either. Google’s eye is on the world. I know this because my neighbor works for GeoEye (Google’s satellite mapping partner). Google has a huge (saturated) pipeline to GeoEye where they are continuously collecting detailed. It was another a matter of time before the GPS industry got rocked by Google’s disruptive business model (less than free).

Google owns their own map of the world; we’re connecting the dots.

In November 2009, I made the conscious decision to separate my personal and professional social networks. Facebook became my center for personal interactions with friends, family, and co-workers that I’m actually friends with outside of work. My twitter account suddenly took new meaning as I devoted it to professional development in the world of higher education and technology. I still had non-professional contacts in my twitter account that needed attention, so I created a separate account for those interactions.

So became “atworkryan” and “atplayryan”. I didn’t have to think about how I was using either one, because its use was crystal clear in the avatars I had created.

Where does Google Buzz fit into this puzzle? I’m not sure yet. As I was mentioning to my co-worker, my Gmail account is a personal account. I have a feeling that any integration will be on the personal level. It will be interesting to see if Buzz takes over something like Yammer for internal social networking for those who are lucky enough to be part of the Google Apps environment.

Also a Youtube news snippet on how the Salvation Army is using Google Voice for volunteer recruitment processing.

both stories via the Google Grants blog.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/upload-your-files-and-access-them.html

http://notaland.com/