By now, most of us have heard about Google’s newest integration, Buzz, but perhaps one of the main questions that comes with the service is, “what do I need to know about Buzz?”

Answer: nothing.

But just to show the reader there’s nothing they need to know, I’ll go ahead and point out a few items of interest anyway. False disclaimer: this information may be useless.

What does Buzz do?

The first realization people might see is that Buzz sits in the Gmail and basically emails itself over and over when you get Buzzed; it’s very vain, I know. With some simple email filters, this vanity goes away, but the problem still remains, “why are all my email buddies spamming this wall thing?”

This is normal, and the experienced FriendFeed user may find themselves right at home. Buzz, first and foremost, connects things. It connects email identities and it connects the generated data associated with those identities. In short, it allows a user to share their activities from various services with their friends and followers, and allows those friends and followers to discuss or comment if they like.

It’s a simple concept and a high-level abstraction with broad implications. Email identity-based “social network.” That’s enough pointlessness for this section. Moving on.

Buzz for the Google Readerer

Google Reader is a pretty popular thing around this community, especially shared items. Buzz connected with Google Reader works in similar fashion to shared items (they are shared items after all), so even with the different appearance, reading and conversation occur like native Reader shares. See nothing to know.

Here are a few interesting, but still highly unnecessary points about Buzz shares:

Muting - Shared items can now be muted. If you don’t like the discussion of a share and don’t want to see it popup as unread stuff, mute it.

Public link - Shares now have a public permalink which shows both the share, and the comment thread. (I know that will please zaitcev a little)…. but really who needs public links?

Replying - Although I’ve not tested it with shared items, users may comment on Buzz updates without any relation to the user. For the most part, you can take part in any thread so long as it’s visible. See how I commented here, no prior relation to the user.

All this new-born suck is okay, because shared items can still be interfaced within Reader. So if you live in a world which doesn’t change, you can still keep it real.

Buzz at the Core

I’ll just go even more out of the way and briefly touch on more unimportant aspects of the concept at hand, the protocols (why they don’t matter can be read here). While there are others specs involved, they are pretty much for structuring data, so here are the big four:

Atom - Most of us are familiar with this, as it’s a feed format for which we can syndicate information. It’s a lot like RSS, but created specifically for this feed stuff. Why’s it special? Simple, it’s extensible (xml is extensible by definition); other unnecessary information can be crammed inside it without any worries.

Bottom line: this one goes to infinity.

PuSH - PuSH is a sexy term, short for pubsubhubbub, aka totally unimportant, but still sexy. It’s a silly spec that allows those Atom things to push updates in real-time to subscribers across open hubs. So long as it’s structured like a feed, PuSH will sex it up.

Bottom line: if polling is a wienerfest, PuSH is definitely a sexy party.

WebFinger - This one is just keepin’ it nasty with the terminology. In the old days, you could straight finger users to find out cool information and stalk them if you like, but now with the web and all… WebFinger is a designed method for hardcore stalking by identities that look a lot like email addresses. Data such as name, bio, a picture, and other services profiles can be attached to an email id with WebFinger.

Bottom line: what’s your position on stalking?

Salmon - As we may know, salmon swim upstream, which I suppose is how this one came to be. It looks a lot like Atom (it is Atom) but has some magic stuff for checking that a “response” is legit. Yes, this is about responses, comments, replies, discussions, threads, conversation… uselessness. It can be considered the Internet’s @reply. With it, one can pretty much @reply anything with a URL…. kinda like how some dogs will hump anything.

Bottom line: conversation is overrated.

Conclusion

If you like uncouth information that really “gets around,” Buzz might be attractive; sometimes it’s fun that way…. yea… Well, hopefully it’s clear why there isn’t anything needed to know about Buzz, and we should all feel very relieved we can continue living in yesterday.

Cheers.