Currently, ‘staying connected’ means having to check status messages, tweets, update streams etc. all of which can be pretty time consuming and at times confusing for users.

Google is making use of its experience in the field of organising information, to sort out the mess that users often find themselves in.

Google Buzz has been launched as a news service built into Gmail on PCs and mobiles. Buzz makes use of the users list of contacts, in their address book, and thus automatically lets users follow the people whom they email or chat with most often. The service integrates photos, videos and links that can be shared in real-time, either publicly or privately as per the users requirements.

Buzz, when first introduced a few days ago, did not give users a choice, thus inviting criticism regarding the lack of privacy, since users do not always want all their contacts to receive all their updates and vice versa. Google has now introduced an auto-suggest feature, instead of the earlier auto-follow feature.

Other services like Flickr and Twitter can also be accessed through Buzz.

While it seems like an interesting service, there are many who feel that Google Buzz will not really simplify the process of social networking. Moreover, the poor choice of name – Google Buzz sounds like a rip-off of Yahoo! Buzz – and the initial teething problems seem to have put people off the service already.

The fact that Buzz is integrated into Gmail, though, might make it win fans and users in the long run, simply because it’s already there , so long as Google continues to make improvements and doesn’t alienate any more users.

Yahoo! Buzz

Stories on Buzz will initially be seeded from 100 pre-approved publishers. However, once the system is out of beta more publishers will be invited to share their content and get traffic from the site.

Users can “Buzz” up a story that they find interesting. Every time a user clicks on the Buzz button alongside a story, its Buzz Score is incremented. The search term popularity and the number of times a story is emailed from Buzz also count towards the Buzz Score. Stories with the highest Buzz Score are shown in descending order on the Yahoo! Buzz homepage.

The most attractive thing about Yahoo! Buzz is that the stories with the highest Buzz Scores may be published on the Yahoo! homepage, which can drive millions of visitors to the site in just one day.

Popular stories from each day will be encapsulated on the Buzz Log, the same way that the Buzz Index has been doing for popular search trends on Yahoo! since October 2005.

Yahoo! Buzz is very similar to many other social content websites, e.g. del.icio.us, Digg, Propeller, Reddit, StumbleUpon and last week’s latest arrival, BigNews from Ask.com.

According to Yahoo!, Buzz is unique because their rankings also take into account things like trends in search queries on Yahoo! Search and the number of times that content is shared with friends over email. Internet users are not as likely to be impressed with Yahoo!’s latest offering.

Various generic and niche social news sites already rule this space. Digg receives an estimated 12.5 million monthly users, compared to Propeller, launched by AOL last year, which receives less than 3 million users. Yahoo! Buzz will need to fight hard to wrestle traffic away from these sites, and while publishers might be keen to join, with the hopes of making it to the Yahoo! homepage, users will not be as keen to leave their established favourite social news sites.

The screenshot above illustrates that Yahoo! Buzz is not seeing huge volumes on its first day. While the Buzz Scores of the top stories are in the hundreds, closer inspection reveals that the actual number of votes is much, much lower (read the number of votes below the highlighted “buzz up” button). This could change, of course if the service is properly marketed and diligently promoted for a long time.

We have a couple more screenshots from the system below:

Error message that shows up when you try to Buzz a story that isn’t integrated into the Buzz system.

Related top stories are suggested when you Buzz! up a story.

Yahoo! Open Search will allow third party website owners to present more useful information about their site on the search results page. Webmasters will be able to substitute the regular title link and description snippet with all sorts of additional information including images, deeper site links, reviews, ratings, prices, contact details and more.

If the Open Search platform is implemented well, and abuse kept under control, it could take the concept of universal search to an all new level. Webmasters will have more control over their site listings and users will now be able to control what they see in their search results by turning off anything they dislike in Open Search.

As shown in the sample Open Search result above, which was provided by Yahoo!, a publisher like the New York Times, Yelp, or even a small local website can supply Yahoo! with additional data. The Yahoo! Search algorithm will then present that data to users at the right time.

TechCrunch reports that while the Open Search program will provide third parties the incentive to add images and more links with the aim of driving more traffic to their site, it will not allow them to affect the search rankings in any way.

Yahoo! Open Search Site

Vish Makhijani, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo! Search says “We believe that combining a free, open platform with structured, semantic content from across the Web is a clear win for all parties involved – site owners, Yahoo! and most importantly, our users.”

Yahoo! Open Search is the best piece of news and the most groundbreaking innovation to come out of the beleaguered Internet giant in recent times.