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On stage revealing the new product was Bradley Horowitz, Google’s Vice President for product Management. While introducing the product, Mr. Horowitz focused on the human penchant to share their experiences and the social media phenomenon of wanting to share it in real-time. These two key themes were core philosophies behind Google Buzz.

mostly because nobody can figure out what it does or how it works, so that it exists only as a catnip toy for new media wanker-pundits who love it because it gives them something to blather on about

A tool like Google Buzz, however, relies on the web of connections users have established in their social networks, and loses much of its appeal without the ability to integrate Picasa, YouTube, and other such services. Users don't want to have to manage dual personas, so Google needs to figure out how to integrate the enterprise and consumer services, but provide IT administrators with the tools necessary to restrict or deny access.

Evri Acquires Radar Networks In Semantic Search Consolidation 10 Comments Share6 Buzz it by Erick Schonfeld on Mar 11, 2010 After shopping itself around to all the major search engines, Radar Networks finally found a buyer in another semantic search startup. Today, Evri is announcing that it will be acquiring Radar Networks, along with its core technical team and its main product, Twine. Rumors surfaced yesterday on ReadWriteWeb that Evri was being acquired, but that is not the case. Evri is the acquirer. I spoke with both CEOs this morning. They would not disclose the terms of the deal, but it is safe to assume that it was largely an equity-based transaction. Both Evri and Radar Networks share Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital as their largest shareholder. Radar has raised $24 million in total capital, while Evri has raised $8 million. (At least that is what has been publicly disclosed. Paul Allen has poured much more money into Evri almost single-handedly, perhaps even more than Radar raised). Radar was unable to raise more during the recession and kept pushing out the release of its next product, T2, an ambitious project to create a semantic index of the Web. Using this semantic index, T2 can do a better job understanding what each Web page it indexes is about.

Earlier this month social software designer Adrian Chan offered up a proposal for what he called Action Streams.

Action streams would not only share status/activity update meta-data but also permit updates to function as actions. For example, an invitation update posted in twitter could be accepted in Buzz. The vision for action streams thus involves a distributed and decentralized ecosystem of coupled action posts, rendered by third party stream clients and within participating social networks.

The Activity Streams discussion is participated in by engineers from companies like Google, Facebook, Nokia, Yahoo and others. Chris Messina, who joined Google in January, is one of the key voices, and semantic web builder Monica Keller, who left MySpace for Facebook last month, appears to be taking an even more active role in the effort than she had before.