The Internet has been abuzz with Google’s announcement of Buzz, their new social networking platform that they just announced about a day ago.

Of course, Facebook is the king of the hill in the social networking space that Google is going after.

Reams of commentaries and news analysis has been written about this — here are some excellent ones by PC Mag and TechCrunch — so I’m not going to delve into the history and just go straight to the point with my comments.

With Buzz bundled in Gmail natively, my gut feel is that it has a good chance of taking off, especially with the huge Gmail install base. Went to the Buzz website to find out more, but apparently it’s not available for Singapore yet.

Here’s their statement on the site:

We’re still rolling out Buzz to everyone, so if you don’t see it in your Gmail account yet, check back soon.

*Update*: It’s now up for me. That was fast!

That’s about it for the newspoint. The story I really want to write, however, is how Google has been taking over all the tools I’ve been using.

My seduction by Google

I’ve been happily seduced by Google’s great applications thus far — I couldn’t survive without Google search and Gmail as a freelance journalist — but I can’t help but feel a little perturbed that Google has become so pervasive in my life.

I’m on an Android mobile phone. Now Android is the open-source mobile platform by Google, and it’s being supported by many phone manufacturers. It’s great for its integration with Gmail, which I use as my primary email. My copy editor IMs me on Google Chat, which pings me on my phone immediately.

I’m a huge fan of Gothere.sg, a local Singaporean map provider, but Google has too much integration to their cloud for me to fight, and unfortunately their apps are good. Google maps is easy to use on Android. There’s Latitude, where I can see where my friends are at.

Alf was just showing me his use of Google calendar, which is useful if you have to add in a friend’s calendar to coordinate meetings. Both Microsoft Outlook and Apple’s iCal calendaring apps predate Google’s calendar by years, but Google’s cloud version really makes it easy to share.

I’m mainly a Firefox user. Tried Chrome when it first came out, felt it wasn’t polished enough, so quit and went back to Firefox. A tech friend of mine persuaded me to try it again recently when I got my new PC, and the experience has been pretty good. So now I use Chrome and Firefox interchangeably. Sigh. Again, seduced by Google.

This website wouldn’t get half its hits if we weren’t aggregated by Google News. We’re also pretty reliant on Google Analytics to get stats on our site, and I’ve played with the Web Optimizer. All good products.

I use Google Reader to browse my favourite RSS feeds. I don’t really use much of Google Docs except to read the occasional attached document in Gmail and I want nice formatting.

However, when I needed to collaborate with friends on a spreadsheet — a mundane project on estimated costs for our US road trip this May — my friend went with Google Docs to sync up our thoughts across two continents. Again, it’s nothing new, and Microsoft has been doing this for years in a business environment, but it drives home the power of the cloud and the install base of Google.

YouTube. Google Voice. Piccasa. Google Earth. It’s an endless list of apps that I’ve used or tried.

It is unlikely that you’ve not been touched by Google in some way. “Just Google it” has been etched into our everyday lexicon, and is an extremely powerful meme for search: Find that song lyrics, cool movie trailer, or latest news.

Google is everywhere it seems. Except China, where there are Chinese analogues like Baidu (Google Search), TuDou (YouTube), and Kai Xin Wang and Ren Ren Wang (Facebook). I’ve not done a thorough Google search(!), but I’m sure there are other language-specific analogues that tackle their home markets as well.

And that’s probably not such a bad thing. It’s good to have alternatives to the tech giant even if those are smaller and more niche. Google is a listed corporation after all, despite their “Do No Evil” motto.

…And back to the newspoint

If you’re still with me after that long personal rambling story, that is why I think with Buzz bundled into Gmail’s install base, FaceBook is in for a fight.

Now I’m a user of FB. I think it’s a great product for social chitchat and games, and I love it for its ability to organize events.

But as a journalist I would often end my tech stories by saying never discount Microsoft / IBM / Cisco / Oracle / HP, and now especially Google. Because these companies have tons of money that they can bleed oponents dry, even if you have the better product.

Techgoondu had the chance to be at unConference 2009 held yesterday at the Biopolis, thanks to the kind folks at e27 who had put together an excellent program that brought together some of the top forward-thinkers in the region. Here’s a recap of what I felt were the highlights of the event:

Panel discussion: Innovation in Asia and where is it heading?

The panel was chaired by Benjamin Joffe, founder and CEO of +8* (Plus Eight Star). Participants included Scott Rafer, CEO at Lookery, Dr Gang Lu, co-founder of OpenWeb Asia, Dr Lai Kok Fung, co-founder and CEO of Buzzcity, and Wong Hoong Ann, founder of HungryGoWhere.com.

Each panelist was asked to share how he spotted the opportunity that led them to start their companies. Scott, who started MyBlogLog and sold it Yahoo later, noted that his venture was “almost accidental”, while Hoong Ann of HungryGoWhere identified the need for a marketing channel catered to F&B establishments, particularly among small restaurants. His business and ad model was changed many times, because “you need the flexibility to start a business.”

Dr Lai of Buzzcity, which started as as dotcom company specializing in WAP mobile communications, said his company did not plan for the company’s current successes in South Africa and Indonesia. It was only after the rapid rise in the number of users accessing the Web on the cellphone some time later that spearheaded Buzzcity’s business in the two countries.

Dr Gang Lu, shared his experience with start-ups in China, which comprises three groups. The first are the copycats who will copy successful products and business models, but “the problem is everyone else will be doing the same thing”. It will be hard for copycats to stand out from the pack. He noted that at one point, there were over 150 YouTube clones in China, but only 10 are surviving today.

The second group will take successful products and localize them accordingly in their target markets – an example would be Xiaonei.com, which is now more popular than Facebook in China. Finally, the last group of entrepreneurs would chart their own path through innovation that would eventually lead to their own unique products.

The panelists largely agreed that selling to businesses is always more profitable than selling to consumers, since consumers are typically unwilling to pay for Internet services – advertising is thus the most common way of monetizing their services. In some market segments, selling virtual goods has proven to be a viable as exemplified by Xiaonei.com and Kaixin001.com.

Panelists were also quizzed on what they were doing to mitigate the dependency on search engines, particularly Google, for their site traffic. Hoong Ann of HungryGoWhere.com shared his company’s brush with Google which reduced his business by half in a single day after his website was placed on page 945 in the search results. Dr Lai suggested that start-ups should grow their organic traffic, while Dr Gang added that they try to grow traffic from social media platforms, which allow them to seed communities and build their brands without Google.

Techgoondu also checked out some promising products and start-ups, and these caught our eye.

iTwin was born out of Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) and will be commercialized by Exploit Technologies, A*Star’s marketing and commercialization arm. Essentially, it is a device that can be split into two halves. By plugging each half via a USB port into a home and remote PC respectively, a secured communication channel is established to allow the remote PC to access files on the home PC. In fact, the solution is so elegant that no password is required. The communication is encrypted and authentication is provided through a random key generated by the home PC’s device.

The folks behind iTwin expect the device to be launched by Fall 2009 at a price of between US$40 and US$50. Work is for the device’s software for Windows XP is almost completed, and there are plans to support Windows Vista and Mac OS X. The product roadmap also includes video conferencing applications and even mobile device file transfer.

Fusion Garage was founded by R. Chandrasekar, a familiar face in the Singapore tech circle. Chandra was the founder of Radixs, which previously developed the Motion Experience Interface (MXI) operating system and the Velvet Puffin integrated online service that marries social networking and instant messaging.

The company is currently developing the software for the CrunchPad, a web tablet hardware device conceived by the folks at Techcrunch:

The idea is to get a new type of device into people’s hands for as cheap as possible (we were aiming for $200, it looks like $299 is more realistic). It fits perfectly on your lap while you are sitting in front of the TV, so you can look up stuff on Wikipedia or IMDB as you channel surf. It plays Flash video flawlessly so you can watch movies and TV shows on Hulu or Joost or wherever. Or listen to music on MySpace Music. Or use TokBox to have a video chat with your parents. Then check email and call it a day. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Hulu, Wikipedia, Google Docs and Gmail are the killer apps for this device.

Because the device skips the resource-sucking parts of the operating system and focuses on one application – the browser – very low end hardware can be used and still give users a desktop-like Internet browsing experience.

The team from Fusion Garage did not show off any working prototypes of the Crunchpad at the event. For more information, check out this video:

Shown to a group of media here on Wednesday, it’s offers “zero-click” access to your Facebook pals’ status updates because it shows up on the main screen without you having to go into any menu. It’s Sony Ericsson’s latest attempt to hook up its users to the social media world easily.

What you get is a scrollable list of your pal’s status updates on-screen – and you can click on their faces to interact more. It’s a bit like the live RSS updates on the main phone screen that Sony Ericsson currently offers on some of its phones, which to me, is an excellent tool.

Better yet, the integration with Facebook extends to the C510′s photo features as well. You can snap a picture of a pretty tart (the tea-time snack) and upload it by simply selecting to “send it” to Facebook. After you’ve logged in once, the tightly-integrated interface takes care of things automatically.

You’d wish Sony Ericsson (SE), and indeed other phone makers, will take the cue now to push more easier-to-use services on their devices. For now, it’s only “testing water” with the C510, the only model to support this Facebook application.

It is starting with the C510 because of its Cybershot photo features, which the phone maker believes will attract users who take pictures of their afternoon tea and tarts and upload them onto their Facebook pages for their 500 friends to see.

Okay, I jest. But it’s a good move by SE and indeed other phone makers of late to tightly integrate with not just e-mail but social networking services like Facebook. Over the past couple of years, we’ve had better mobile access to Internet services, starting with e-mail offerings like Yahoo and Google to multimedia services like YouTube and iTunes, and SE’s application is a continuation of the trend as the competition heats up.

Just imagine, to ensure it keeps its lead, Nokia has been bundling, first, maps, then music and now push e-mail on its phones, so you’re buying not just a phone, but one that opens up to a world of fun and useful applications.

Which should tell you how backward we – that is, the rest of the world outside Japan – have been. Before the first overhyped iPhones turned up in Tokyo, people there already had e-mail on their phones for years (mobile messages have always been sent over e-mail, instead of SMS, which really started as an “European”, GSM thing).

As the mobile and Internet worlds converge, it’s good to see Google, Yahoo and Apple take the lead in pushing more services onto mobiles. This is after seeing how the Nokia-led telecom world outside Japan had failed to make mobile Internet work at the turn of the century – just think back at those bad, old days, when the entire GSM world was engulfed in self-doubt after those horrible first-gen 3G phones.

In contrast, the Japanese have had tightly-integrated services like eBay, karaoke score updates, mobile payment at convenience stores and other knick-knack applications for years, for example, on NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode platform. The rest of the world is just catching up, in many ways.

We have Social Media Breakfast (SMB), Mobile Mondays and Web Wednesdays.

We have groups like The Digital Movement (TDM) and e27 running all kinds of events from Barcamps to Blogouts to Unconferences, with much of the content revolving around social media and start-ups.

Do we really need another social media get-together platform in Singapore?

The folks behind 24seven — bloggers Claudia Lim and Kelvin Lim — think so. And thus Tweet Tuesdays was born.

The first session was run a week ago at The Sail last Tuesday. I got a facebook invite from Claudia, wondered what the heck Tweet Tuesday was, and so turned up for a look-see.

“It’s not supposed to be another stand-around-and-network-whilst-eating-free-food session,” said Kelvin in his opening introduction to the gathered crowd of about 50 to 60 social media bloggers, many who attended (like me) due to word-of-mouth facebook invites.

So what is it supposed to be? According to the organisers, it is supposed to be a platform on micro-blogging (i.e. Twitter and Plurk) — at least initially — and an opportunity for folks to share tips, tricks, and tools for this platform. It’s also a community potluck, and future sessions are likely to be run in an unconference-styled format.

According to an informal online poll done by the 24seven folks prior to the meetup, the attendees for the first Tweet Tuesday event in Singapore seem to be quite social media savvy:

I asked Claudia what made this different from SMB, and her response was that SMB is better for networking (i.e. stand around and network whilst eating free food). Both she and Kelvin want Tweet Tuesdays to be a little more structured, which would serve the community in a different way. Mobile Mondays and Web Wednesdays are run from a corporate perspective, which is different when it is organised from a bottoms-up grassroots community.

My take? I couldn’t see much difference between the first Tweet Tuesday meetup and the SMB sessions. Yet. But it’s the first get-together, it’s community run, there was pizza and beer, so it was pretty fun. It’s work to organise something, even if it’s a grassroots event (that’s something the Techgoondus know firsthand), so kudos. Still, hopefully any future sessions will have more structure, which will give Tweet Tuesdays its own niche.

The reason we’re doing this is because start-ups make for great stories but often they don’t get enough notice. Also, it’s a fun way to build a bottom up grassroots tech community in Singapore.

First, a group picture of who we are. Wanted to find a way to tag individuals, like in Facebook, so I used Phlook. For those that have not heard of them, Phlook is a pretty cool Singapore-based social platform start up that allows you to manipulate and share photos.

Use the “notes” function in the sidebar to see the tagging.

A photo of the Techgoondu folks in our last meetup where this idea was hatched. Unfortunately, both Roland and Stephanie are missing.

Lifted directly from the Meet the Techgoondus event on Facebook:

Details
Host: Chi-Loong
Type: Meetings – Informational Meeting
Date: Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Time: 7:30pm – 9:00pm
Location: Geek Terminal, 55 Market Street, #01-01
City/Town: Singapore, Singapore
Email: chiloong@techgoondu.com

Description

Interested in getting free publicity for your Singapore technology start-up?

Meet the Techgoondus! Techgoondu (www.techgoondu.com) is a tech blog run by a bunch of ex and current journalists and we’d like to meet you! You might get featured in social media AND traditional media if your stories are interesting!

All you need to do is to show up. No dress code. No cover charge. Just a mingle with folks who have a love of technology and all things Singaporean.

It’s best if you can demo something, so bring your laptop or mobile and show off your stuff!

Please send me a request if you’d like to come via Facebook or email. We’d like to keep the session small and informal, with a group size of about 20. Target audience will primarily be Singapore tech start-ups, or PR agencies and tech vendors who have an interest in this space.

And finally, a big thanks to the Geek Terminal folks for letting us use the place!

Call me impressed with blobs meet Facebook concept! Having used the new Facebook Xperia panel briefly last week, I must say this alternative mobile interface for Facebook is one of the best to date. Better than Facebook’s own insipid mobile version.

I don’t have a screenshot to show, but click on this link to see what I mean by blobs. Basically, Xperia X1 owners who have installed this free panel will be greeted by a Facebook home screen where their friends’ thumbnail photos float quiveringly in blobs around you. Click on a blob to read your friend’s latest status. Better yet, viewing inbox messages, updating status and all those other addictive Facebook chores are all neatly and intuitively collated in the panel.

And the best part is of this panel is that it is surprisingly fleetfooted, something which the other Xperia panels are not. It’s free for Xperia owners, who can go download here.