{"id":6363,"date":"2010-02-10T15:50:32","date_gmt":"2010-02-10T22:50:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wapreview.com\/?p=6363"},"modified":"2010-02-10T19:36:25","modified_gmt":"2010-02-11T02:36:25","slug":"trying-google-buzz-on-android-symbian-and-the-n900","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/6363\/","title":{"rendered":"Trying Google Buzz on Android, Symbian – and the N900"},"content":{"rendered":"

$\"Google$ <\/p>\n

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you probably heard that Google released Buzz yesterday.\u00a0 Details are on the Google Blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Buzz appears to be Google’s attempt at building an app that combines the best features of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare into a single all singing, all dancing desktop AND mobile service. With Buzz you can publicly or privately post status updates, photos and videos, view your friends Buzzes and view nearby Buzzes on a map.\u00a0 Buzzes can automatically include your location or you can choose to hide it.\u00a0 You can comment on both your friends buzzes and nearby ones.<\/p>\n

Reactions to Buzz from around the Web seem mixed. I’ve yet to find a big name blogger who is really singing its praise.\u00a0 Scobilzer’s<\/a> lukewarm and James Whatley<\/a>‘s negative reactions seem typical.\u00a0 On the practical side, Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb has some great tips<\/a> on actually using the service, including how to remove it from Gmail.<\/p>\n

Feature<\/strong><\/td>\n	Android 2.0+<\/strong><\/td>\n	Android 1.6+<\/strong><\/td>\n	BlackBerry<\/strong><\/td>\n	iPhone<\/strong><\/td>\n	Nokia S60<\/strong><\/td>\n	Windows Mobile<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
buzz.google.com<\/td>\n	Yes<\/td>\n	Coming soon<\/td>\n	Coming soon<\/td>\n	Yes<\/td>\n	Coming soon<\/td>\n	Coming soon<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Buzz Layer on Google Maps for mobile<\/td>\n	Yes<\/td>\n	Yes<\/td>\n	Coming soon<\/td>\n	Yes<\/td>\n	Yes<\/td>\n	Yes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Buzz on a Place Page<\/td>\n	Yes<\/td>\n	?<\/td>\n	<\/td>\n	Yes<\/td>\n	<\/td>\n	<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Voice shortcuts<\/td>\n	Yes<\/td>\n	?<\/td>\n	<\/td>\n	Yes<\/td>\n	<\/td>\n	<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Buzz icon shortcuts<\/td>\n	Yes<\/td>\n	?<\/td>\n	<\/td>\n	Yes<\/td>\n	<\/td>\n	<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n There’s no Buzz in my desktop Gmail on\u00a0 Opera, Chrome or Firefox. Things were better on mobile. Installing Maps 4.0 from the Market on my HTC\u00a0 Magic running Android 1.6 was a snap.\u00a0\u00a0 It wasn’t so easy on the N95.\u00a0 Google’s instructions, which say to go to buzz.google.com<\/a> with the phone browser, are wrong. On Symbian phones you actually have to visit m.google.com\/maps<\/a> to download the update.\u00a0 Once installed I found Buzz in Maps 4.0 on both devices to be pretty full featured.\u00a0 You can post Buzzes and see nearby ones on the map and comment on them. Although Whatleydude complained of only seeing two Buzzes\u00a0 on his Maps in London, here in San Francisco the Maps are overflowing with them! The one thing you can’t do with Buzz in Maps is view or respond to Buzzes from your non-local followers.<\/p>\n So what about the N900? Out of the box, Buzz is not available on Nokia’s open source flagship.\u00a0 Abhista<\/a> has figured out\u00a0 how to change the MicroB’s browser user-agent so that it looks like a Nexus One to Google.\u00a0 Here are his instructions:<\/p>\n \n Install Hide User Agent<\/strong> from Application Manager<\/em><\/li>\n Go to Control Panel<\/em> and open Hide User Agent<\/strong><\/li>\n Set user agent to \nMozilla\/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1; en-us; dream) AppleWebKit\/525.10+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version\/3.0.4 Mobile Safari\/523.12.2<\/strong><\/li>\n Click on Set<\/li>\n The browser will be restarted<\/li>\n Now go to the browser and open http:\/\/buzz.google.com<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n If you try this yourself\u00a0 here are a few things you need to be aware of.<\/p>\n \n In order to see Hide User Agent<\/em> in the App Manager you need to add and enable the Extras Testing <\/em>repository<\/a>.\u00a0 Hide User Agent<\/em> itself seems safe and stable but be sure to disable Extras Testing after installing it to avoid accidentally installing other apps from the testing repository.<\/li>\n Hide User Agent doesn’t seem to\u00a0 let you paste in user agents, you have to carefully type\u00a0 them in!<\/li>\n Instead of using the Nexus One User Agent you can also use the iPhone’s;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n Mozilla\/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit\/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version\/4.0 Mobile\/7A400 Safari\/528.16<\/p>\n I’m not sure which User Agent I prefer.\u00a0 With the Nexus One User Agent\u00a0 Buzz fit the screen better but the little Buzz bubbles didn’t appear on the map. With the iPhone User-Agent, the bubbles appeared but there was some text overlapping and a blank space at the bottom of the screen in the map view (visible in the screenshot above).<\/p>\n Buzz builds upon Google’s other recent experiments in the location and the social space; Latitude<\/strong> and Wave<\/strong>, neither of which seem to have much adoption.\u00a0 But Buz does much more than Latitude and is more generally available than Wave, which is still invite only and limited to the iPhone and Android on mobile.\u00a0 It’s also nice to see that Google included Symbian this time around.\u00a0 Restricting buzz.google.com to just a few browsers is dumb though<\/strong>. That just annoys the early adopter geeks who are most likely to actually use Buzz.\u00a0 I understand that Buzz hasn’t been tested with other browsers and might not work properly or at all with unsupported ones.\u00a0 But instead of locking the door, the smart thing to do who be to warn visitors\u00a0 with unsupported browsers that things might not work.\u00a0 Buzz actually works quite well with N900 MicroB and in desktop Firefox and Safari when you change their user agents to the iPhone one.<\/p>\n Is Buzz the next Facebook or Twitter?\u00a0 It could be but that will take time and depends to a large extent on how willing people are to share more information with Google. Personally I think Buzz is too noisy and makes it too easy to inadvertently share one’s exact location.\u00a0 To win trust and make Buzz more usable, I think Google needs to improve filtering, add finer grained privacy and sharing options and make the default be to NOT share one’s location.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Unless you’ve been living under a rock you probably heard that Google released Buzz yesterday.\u00a0 Details are on the Google Blog. Buzz appears to be Google’s attempt at building an app that combines the best features of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare into a single all singing, all dancing desktop AND mobile service. With Buzz you can publicly or privately post status updates, photos and videos, view your friends Buzzes and view nearby Buzzes on a map.\u00a0 Buzzes can automatically include … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14586,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[48],"tags":[1436,1020,1403,124,909,106],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6363"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6363"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6376,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6363\/revisions\/6376"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}