Microsoft has released the next version of the venerable Office suite, Office 2010, and companion products Sharepoint 2010 and Visio 2010 (is Sharepoint really an Office companion product? I'll explain that in a minute) today to business customers worldwide.

It's getting harder and harder for Microsoft to make Office launches into a big deal. Office 2010 is basically Office 2007, which was basically Office 2003, each iteration dressed up with a few whiz-bang features that do little or nothing for (and sometimes work directly against) the core functionality that people look for in the package: typing documents and making spreadsheets. While the new features are not universally worthless, they are increasingly disproportionate to the value of the package as a whole.

The whiz-bang this time is Office Web Apps, a free online version of the most popular Office applications: Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.

While I like the strategy the company has adopted for dealing with the advent of cloud computing, I'm not sure I like the results. I think the Software+Service mantra they have chosen to tie existing cash-cow products to various online solutions is a good way to go from their perspective, in that it provides a leash on revenues while giving customers enough taste of the flexibility and power of utility computing to keep them from jumping ship. They are not, however, helping anyone realize any of the significant cost savings that should be possible in the utility computing model, which considering the girth of the company in the marketplace, may simply serve to give the model a bad name. I doubt that anyone in Redmond would shed any tears if that were to happen.

While integration and compatibility are good things, of late Microsoft has been using those desirable elements to create an undesirable one, dependency. This is where Sharepoint as an Office component comes in. Sharepoint has always had strong ties ties to Office, but originally, it was positioned as a sort of easy-to-use, shake-and-bake corporate intranet product. It's pretty effective in that role, and flexible enough to meet most business needs out of the box. But needing a quick response to Google's suddenly popular Apps online-office package ("need" is too strong a word; nonetheless, the company apparently felt a threat from that direction and responded accordingly), Sharepoint was pressed into service as the de facto "cloud" document store for the various online versions of Office. This, again, is not a bad move for Microsoft to make, but again, it fails to showcase the potential flexibility of utility computing.

Office Web Apps are similarly constrained. While they are free, you don't get the full functionality unless you are also using them with Office 2010 on the desktop... with all the attendant costs and constraints that brings to the table. At this point, it's silly to use them otherwise; if you own the full version, you may as well use it instead (if you need access from anywhere, just store them in Sharepoint!) and if you don't, you are better off picking another product which doesn't have the explicit goal of maneuvering you into buying the full package.

Microsoft has intelligently structured the Office game in recent years to effectively prevent customers from considering these factors and to keep adoption rates high. A recent Forrester survey, cited in the link at the top of this post, names some astounding ROI numbers for the Office package, numbers that I would not dispute; compare Office to your average Smith-Corona and see what wins. But the same survey helps illustrate how exactly the game is rigged. The comparison is made in a vacuum, one of Microsoft's own creation. It's not being made against other alternatives... and the Forrester data suggests why that is. More than half of respondents planning to upgrade to 2010 are not doing so because it's better, or because they've evaluated it in any meaningful way against alternatives; they're doing so simply because their licensing terms allow it. It's a human impulse, after all. "Hey, I can get this for free!" It's not free, of course; you paid for it once and will do so again, but the adoption is severed from the payment by terms of contract, which makes it intentionally difficult to associate the two events, and particularly difficult to get out of the cycle. It's the same reason any sort of recurring billing is a hit revenue model. The customer pays before he realizes it, then decides since the product is already paid for to go ahead and use it.

Those familiar with the "business as conflict" school of thought will recognize that this scenario puts the company inside your OODA loop, a bad place to allow an adversary. You may question whether or not Microsoft is an adversary, but putting all the feel-good partnership language aside, when someone is trying to take money out of your pocket without being entirely up front about the exchange, that puts them on the other team in my book.

Of course, they won't come out and say it, but as they slowly alter Windows to adopt tried and true Unix models, you get the idea: Server Core Best Practices on Windows Server

Not having to install the kitchen sink on every server has long given *nix systems an edge in performance and security. Keep it up, and Windows will just be another Linux distribution in the crowd before long!

Smallbiztechnology.com suggests you do just that unless they can answer three questions:

• What books have you recently read?


• What industry conferences have they been to?


• What tech industry relationships (and certifications) do they have?

Those questions aren't bad in and of themselves; you should satisfy yourself as to the qualifications of any contractor you hire. The justification presented for asking them, however, is terrible and exposes the number one unquestioned assumption both among these so-called "consultants" and many of the businesses they cater to. The assumption is exposed in one concise sentence in the post:

SMB Nation East took place this weekend in New Jersey and one of the big lessons learned at the 3 day event, of which I attended Friday, was the differentiation between those IT consultants who still are "only" able to fix your computers when things go wrong, but not able to provide strategic insight to help you grow your business.

Where did anyone ever get the idea that in something as complex and dynamic as information technology, the same person who is well-qualified to fix your technical problems would also be even remotely qualified to provide strategic insight into your business operations? Why would anyone imagine they could get both of those very specialized skills in a one-person package for the low-end rates that most of these people charge? It's like saying your neighborhood EMT should be able to also do heart surgery, and at the same mid-five figure salary he's already getting paid!

I suggest you put some thought first into whether you actually have an IT consultant, or have just hired a technician. Frankly, there's nothing wrong with just hiring a technician, and by default, that is what most small businesses have done... they don't like the price tags on real consultants. Where the problem comes in is when the assumption is made, as above, that your tech janitor should be making (and that you should be listening to) strategy suggestions.

This isn't to disparage those technicians; they simply have a different focus, and different motivations, than real IT consultants. But the motivations make all the difference.

Case in point is item three on the question list: tech industry relationships and certifications. You absolutely want your technician to have certifications these days for the technologies they are working with. But consider what that means for that technician. Unless he has all the certifications, for every technology, then what technology do you think he is going to recommend you use to solve your next business problem? And if, for whatever reason, he didn't suggest the one that was going to get him more business, what basis might he have for doing so without any certification in it?

A consultant doesn't have an investment in your choice of a given technology, because they aren't supporting it over the long run. This leaves them free to make strategic recommendations unencumbered with concerns over future revenue. Their goal can be exclusive to finding the best solution to meet your particular challenges.

If they can't do that, by all means, fire them. And ask more than three questions; you're paying top dollar, make sure you're getting the best. But don't expect them to come fix your printer. And don't expect your technician to provide you with top-flight strategic advice, and don't fire him if he doesn't give it to you. It was your mistake asking in the first place, not his in answering. If you need strategic insight to help grow your business, go find someone who is an expert in providing such advice, not someone who worked hard to get their Microsoft certification papers. An MCSE is an accomplishment, but hardly one that indicates a deep understanding of the broad panoply of technology options facing the modern business.

This is a bit of a digression (which is filed under "Ramblings") but then, I'm prone to those, and why go into business for yourself if you don't want to digress every now and then, eh?

The clamor on the web over the discovery, and subsequent purchase, of a prototype next generation Apple iPhone by tech rumor/news site Gizmodo has been dwarfed by the furor unleashed when it was revealed that California police later raided the home office of Jason Chen, the editor responsible for the story generated by the original incident. Because these are mostly bloggers reacting to the search and seizure of another blogger's technological assets, the stories are running ten to one against the cops, with the few supporting exceptions largely coming from die-hard Apple fans who felt the company was wronged and are hoping for a comeuppance for Gizmodo.

The police are playing it pretty close to the vest with their investigation so far, which has made it easy to attribute a sort of Big-Brother-like malicious intimidation to the act, but I think that's premature. If it's true that police are often overly secretive, it's also true that exposing too much information too early in an investigation can queer the pitch and result in the perpetration of injustice, and I think a little patience (certainly more than has been exhibited so far) is in order. The time and place for a judgement of their actions is in a courtroom when all the facts are on the table. It's way too early for that to happen.

The speculation so far revolves around two possibilities: one, that they are investigating the original discoverer of the lost phone for theft (according to most interpretations I have seen so far, California law is a little fuzzy on this point but a prosecutor could certainly argue the original finder did not make the required "good faith" effort to return the device that is required to keep the act from becoming a theft), or two, that they are investigating Gizmodo for receiving stolen goods. The five thousand dollars the company paid for the device seems to indicate they knew there was something less-than-kosher about the deal.

It's entirely possible the police are investigating both and don't have a firm idea what happened. That's why investigations occur. You don't always know what the charges are going to be until you unearth the evidence, and this is a beneficial feature of our system in my opinion. If that's a fishing trip, as some people are saying, then so is every criminal investigation. While the crime is pretty clearly overblown, it nonetheless appears to have occurred. If you're not going to allow the police to get to the bottom of such things, cut them a severance check and send 'em home... there's little other use for law enforcement agency.

The primary argument against the search and seizure warrant has been that Chen is protected under both California and federal journalist shield laws, provisions made to protect First Amendment free speech rights. If anything, this portion of the debate has been even less clear than that dealing with the police investigation. Bloggers are simply throwing "shield law" out there as if it protects against all evils, without much substantiation. Few have bothered to actually read the text in question, or apply it to the situation at hand. Instead, much is being made of a single, unsupported statement in this Wired post, which says, "The government cannot seize material from the journalist even if it’s investigating whether the person who possesses the material committed a crime."

This is supposedly a provision of the federal Privacy Protection Act, but from my reading of the law (IANAL, of course) the Wired statement, if not entirely incorrect, is at least incomplete. There are at least two exceptions under which material can be seized even from a journalist, and at least one of them seems to apply, albeit rather narrowly. Indeed, it would be very strange if the government were as restricted as Wired claims; almost any crime committed by a journalist could not be investigated fully. Subpeonas can be used rather than warrants, but the potential and temptation for destruction of incriminating evidence by the guilty party would seem to militate against them.

People have gone back and forth over whether Chen even is a journalist and so worthy of such protections anyway, but most seem to agree that California law is reasonably clear on that point, and in any event I would argue that bloggers fill a much more important role than the traditional media does in fulfilling the promise of a free press in a democratic society. On the other hand, I get paid for blogging (not on for this blog), and wouldn't consider myself a journalist. There is certainly room for reasonable people to disagree on that point, but I think the important factor is that the sunshine we think is healthy in our society is increasingly being let in by bloggers, whether paid or not, and so the protections we feel should be reasonably extended to those actors in our system should apply to them as well.

On the other hand, who then is not a blogger for these purposes? Everyone uses Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Buzz, or a hundred other blogging or micro-blogging platforms. Is it time to extend protections to everyone against turning over evidence of criminal activity? Because that argument could certainly be made by enterprising lawyers looking to bog down the prosecution in whole hosts of different cases. "Your Honor, my client downloaded and stored those MP3 files as part of an ongoing story about how vile the record companies are, their seizure and the use of meta-tag information to identify the sources and dissemination was a clear violation of the PPA and we move they be excluded from evidence."

Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? But it may not sound so great when it is a file full of your credit card numbers and the same motion is made.

So, Chen's case may be more clear-cut than some (despite one of the principals of Gizmodo denying, not long ago, that the company was any sort of journalistic endeavor), but most of the knee-jerk reaction so far fails to look at the implications of their arguments on technology law enforcement as a whole. If they're right, there would seem to be very little that any "blogger" would have to fear (at least in California) of committing most technology-related crimes.

As we move later in the day today, some more informed and well-reasoned analysis is coming out, and it looks as if the police may have more solid ground to stand on than some would hope. I imagine that the most likely conclusion to all this will be some hasty apologies and agreements not to sue and that the whole issue will never see in the inside of a courtroom, but once again it seems that technology has far outstripped the comprehension of legislators.

There are a lot of advantages to the cloud, or utility, computing model, but it can be difficult for small businesses to see exactly how those apply to their situations. If you are in that group, consider attending a free webinar tomorrow by Ventureneer titled "How, Why, and When Small Businesses and Nonprofits should use cloud computing." Unlike most such presentations, this one isn't being put on by one of the big providers and so looks to be about as unbiased an initial presentation as you will find on the subject.

I run across these stories all the time, sometimes from the client's perspective, sometimes from the prospective of the consultant (almost always, actually, the former consultant), so this recent entry from MIT's Tech from an alum who worked for Boston Consulting Group isn't exactly a shocker. It is, though, one of the clearest and best written articles I have found in the leitmotif, so if you were still wondering why choosing a big consulting company is usually a mistake, it's worth a read.

Although some see these recurring themes in consulting engagements as a curse against consultants everywhere, in fact it is more an indictment of employees who didn't realize the game they were getting into and clients that didn't do their homework about the businesses they chose to rely on for vital business advice and guidance. Good advice is out there, and it's got great value; don't expect you're going to get it just because you are asking a firm with a lot of people on the payroll.

So, I read this morning that new startups are starting up with fewer and fewer staff over time. Apart from the implications that this might have for job growth in our already shaky economy, it also suggests that, just perhaps, the much-vaunted efficiency of technology in business operations is finally being realized.

The advantages of technology were posited long ago, in the sixties and seventies as big business began to invest in information technology with the goal of making their operations more efficient. It didn't. Throughout the eighties and nineties, studies of the relationship between technology investment and productivity failed to show any significant improvements in efficiency associated with technology. Only in the late nineties and the early part of this century have researchers began to uncover subtle gains in efficiencies coming from IT investment.

With those early failures to improve efficiency came a sort of solace to those who had worried that new, hyper-efficient computers would result in massive unemployment, as us poor, pokey old human beings couldn't keep up and would necessarily be kicked out on the streets by our heartless corporate masters. Computers were everywhere, but job growth still boomed, fueled in no small part by the failures of the computers themselves... the support burden of keeping IT systems up and running was no small factor in its failure to introduce real productivity improvements.

But, as it does, technology has evolved, and IT systems today are faster, more stable, and easier to use than ever. As they start to fulfill their original promise, it looks like the original threat, that jobs would disappear, may also be starting to emerge.

This isn't great for the national economy or job-seekers, of course, but for the small business owner or IT manager, it has another set of threats. It means that your competitors are figuring out how to use IT to run a more lean operation, and if you want to stay in the game, you are going to have to do so as well. Years of cruising along with the blanket understanding that IT was difficult, expensive, and ultimately dysfunctional have led to a sort of complacency with the status quo that may now be fatal to small businesses. Technology that breaks, costs inordinate amounts, or does not actually improve your business processes in the ways that it should, can no longer be tolerated. The excuses are disappearing... it's time to make technology, make good.

Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite has made available the bundled products of Exchange, Sharepoint, and Live Meeting, hosted by Microsoft itself, for more than a year now. The $120 per year, per user fee has seemed a little steep, though, considering those same solutions have been available from third parties who have much more experience and for much less money than Microsoft itself. The target market of BPOS, and most of its uptake, has been with larger organizations (many of which were probably able to negotiate much better deals in private, anyway).

The market most open to the hosted services offering, though, and representing the larger total number of seats, is the SMB market. Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley reports that Redmond is finally getting around to rolling out the SMB version of BPOS, due sometime in the second half of 2010.

Pricing isn't available yet, nor is a better long-term perspective on where Microsoft is going with the whole concept. Despite Steve Ballmer's assertion that the company is "all in" on cloud computing, it's not clear that Microsoft really realizes this may be where their bread is buttered for the foreseeable future... and if they don't, then despite their apparently privileged position as the designer of the software in question, you may still be better off buying the same services from smaller third-party hosting companies who have enough skin in the Software as a Service game to encourage stability and reliability.

This is the question posed on Small Business Technology last week. To be fair, the actual question is both a statement and a question: "Google Apps (Cheaper and More Features): Is it time to stop using MSFT Exchange?"

As with most such questions posed without any articulation of the desired end-state of the arrangement, there's no one right answer, of course. But the initial assumptions are a little worrisome and I would suggest if you pose the question while holding them, you're almost certainly going to come up with the wrong answer.

Does Google Apps have more features? On a bullet-point list, obviously, yes; you have a spreadsheet, word processor, and collaboration site together with Gmail and Google Calendar software, so it's as if you got Exchange plus Microsoft Office together. Sort of. Because if you actually break down each of those products and compare it to the opposite feature by feature, you'd find that in fact, Microsoft offers a lot more features. And between Exchange/Outlook and Gmail, an awful lot more. Features are, in fact, the one big reason to stay with Exchange for most companies, because Gmail doesn't yet come close to implementing many of the business and collaboration features Exchange offers. Mind you, I am not suggesting that bundles of features are necessarily a plus; that's another unquestioned assumption from the original. But both are wrong.

Next, is it really cheaper? The original article compares the $60 a month the author pays for Exchange hosting with the $50 a year Apps charges. I don't dispute either of those numbers, but I will say you're getting taken for a ride if you are paying $60 a month for a single user Exchange host. Ten dollars a month is closer to the market rates. While that is still twice as expensive as the $5 a month that Apps breaks down to (both rates being per user), it's not nearly as expensive as the comparison being made... and in some cases, well worth it for those extra features Exchange offers that Apps does not.

On the whole, I am an Apps fan, because I actually believe that most of the features offered by Exchange and Outlook are under-utilized and rarely worth the money. But I don't think it's an option that should be ignored based on erroneous assumptions.

Because pretty soon, it's going to be the only smartphone!

I've been one of the few people that have bothered to defend Apple in their recent patent infringement lawsuit against Google-heavy handset maker HTC, but their legitimate right to defend whatever efforts were required to create such an innovative product is starting to get stretched a little thin in light of recent information. It's been clear that the HTC suit was aimed more broadly than at just HTC, but while many observers have interpreted the goal as being the eventual establishment of various cross-licensing agreements, the reactions detailed in the various posts on Techmeme from other handset makers reveal panic and frenzied efforts to remove disputed features from their own products. It doesn't sound as though licensing has been put on the table as a viable option.

Critics of software patent law and practice have been having a field day with the Apple suit and the chilling effect that those patents have had on the smartphone field in general. It's an old and accepted argument that patents can stifle evolutionary innovation, and the system has made that trade-off to encourage revolutionary innovation, ensuring that individuals and businesses can invest in research and development to bring new ideas to market without being immediately copied and squashed by others with more resources. It's accepted that in the long term the benefit to society is greater even with the limited grant of monopoly to the original innovator.

Software patents and the greater pace of advance in the industry have called that assumption into question, and Apple is apparently going to great lengths to demonstrate just how bad for consumers this state of affairs might be.

It's an oddity that I often find unintentionally related threads of stories on the front page of Techmeme and other tech news sites, and today has been no exception. Together with the news of Apple's strong-arm techniques against other handset makers, today finds an analysis of the invasive and restrictive license agreement required to develop applications for the iPhone (which, unlike competitors, tightly governs all applications that can run on the device). So not only will Apple be your only phone, but Apple will also okay your only Apps, and you better not want porn or bikinis or anything else that might offend Apple or AT&T.

And as if to point out the idiocy of the original patents that all this restriction is based on, another article points out a new patent application from the company, one that covers the use of the phone as an electronic key. So, pretty soon all you Prius owners are going to have to report back in to have your cars retrofitted to use old-school physical keys instead of fobs, I guess.

It's strange and a little sad that a genuinely innovative company like Apple, not one of the leech-like patent trolls that accumulate and sue as their primary business function, but a company that has created truly new and interesting technology, might be the company to finally push the system hard enough to make it obvious to everyone that so much power for so long a span is absolutely a detriment to consumers. Because when you combine the suppression of competing platforms with vice-like control over the content on your own platform, you are unquestionably hurting consumers. It may not be long before the issue inflames passions as much as abortion or gun rights. You can have our Android handsets when you pry them from our cold, dead fingers.

I guess it proved, as I predicted, to be not so essential after all.

Microsoft attributes the discontinuation to "new IT trends" but the product is less than two years old and the trends were taking shape long before that. In fact, in the post linked above, I discuss those trends at some length... more virtualization, less hardware reliance (where EBS required more physical servers than preceding products), less costly hosted alternatives. Those things were obvious enough to potential customers that, by some estimates, less than 100 bought the thing... this despite the predictable excitement of such a money-maker for the Microsoft specialists who form the core of the sales team for the company among SMBs.

So you have certainly heard of Blackberry, the evil, addictive, original wireless e-mail device crafted by those cunning Canadians at Research In Motion. You may even have one yourself, but if you are small business-person, then most likely you are using it entirely apart from any Microsoft Exchange Server that your organization may have (unless, wisely, you have outsourced your Exchange Server services to a large hosting company like, say, MyHosting.com) because until recently, the Blackberry Enterprise server software necessary for integrated wireless sync directly from Exchange was prohibitively expensive and difficult to manage for small IT shops.

Someone at RIM must have noticed this, because they have recently begun offering a version of Enterprise Server, called Enterprise Server Express, for free to small organizations, with reduced license fees for users. That takes care of the prohibitively expensive part; unfortunately, no one thought to address the "difficult to manage" problem.

We had the tremendous displeasure recently of having a client who decided to take advantage of this offer and asked us to help install the server software and get their devices configured. Thus began a twelve-hour odyssey, half of which was spent on the phone with RIM support, which ultimately proved unsuccessful, and exorbitantly expensive for the client despite the software having been "free."

The installation process is complex, unnecessarily so for the small business environment (and perhaps, I suspect, even for larger businesses, although those will certainly have the internal resources to cope), and poorly understood even by RIM's support staff, who passed us back and forth with misdiagnosed issues time after time.

Ultimately, they weren't able to figure it out before our fees got to be more than the whole thing was worth to the client. They are still using the desktop sync capability; we recommended outsourcing Exchange hosting or moving to next-generation phones that will work with Exchange out of the box, like Android, iPhone, or Windows Mobile devices.

Blackberry represents a not uncommon story in information technology, a revolutionary device that breaks all previous boundaries on its release, which then rides its success right into the ground. For other examples, see Novell, VisiCalc, or AOL. You can still find these things around in pockets, with loyal adherents who will use them till death do them part, but for the most part they took the market by storm, failed to adapt, and dwindled. Not infrequently, once it becomes obvious that they have been lapped, these companies offer products which once would have commanded premium prices to customers outside the core market at a ridiculous discount. However, it's a gimmick; the value isn't in the price but the capabilities, but if the capabilities have been outmoded, then any price is excessive.

And that's the case with Blackberry Enterprise Server Express. There are newer solutions, less costly, easier to implement, with more functionality. Don't let the cachet of days past influence your decisions.

So, while I was in Vancouver for the Olympics last week, I didn't pick up too many souvenirs... I noticed that stuff wasn't exactly flying off the shelves, and figured I might wait a week and get much better deals. Surplus stocks of hats, t-shirts, and maple syrup are no doubt going to be hitting the market at much reduced prices after the hordes of tourists leave town. Anyway, this being my plan, I thought idly as I watched the Closing Ceremonies tonight that I would drop by the official store and see if the discounting had yet begun. Instead, I saw the message at left, and thought, "Wow, that was some tremendously poor timing."

But then I checked back a while later and saw this instead:


Server meltdown! Apparently, I wasn't the only one with that bright idea. Looks like the market may show a greater demand after the Games are over than while they were ongoing. The bad timing was mine!

http://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/samples/49-samples/912-five-essential-resources-for-microsoft-licensing.html

From Directions on Microsoft, a list of five important resources for deciphering and appropriately setting up your Microsoft licensing.

So most people have probably at least heard of Twitter, the micro-blogging site that started the trend of putting out short, quick updates on where you are or what you are doing or thinking about at any particular time. But unless you are a geeky sort of person, you probably haven't yet heard about Google's recently released answer to Twitter, Buzz.

Buzz is actually a part of Gmail, the company's free e-mail service, so if you have a Gmail account, you already are automatically in Buzz. It shows up as an icon on the left menu panel near the inbox. It works pretty much exactly like Twitter; you just have a box, where you type in whatever you want (although Buzz doesn't have the sometimes annoying 140 character limit that Twitter is either saddled with or blessed by, depending on who you ask) and click post and it puts it out there. You can also make posts public or private, restricting it to just your allowed Gmail contacts, or showing them to everyone.

Why does anyone need another micro-blogging service? Well, you might not. But Buzz has snared me in a way that Twitter never managed to. A lot of features that Twitter either should have or could benefit from are already in Buzz. With Twitter, you can get those things, but either only through third-party services, through some geeky hacking, or by waiting a long time for Twitter itself to slowly add them, frequently messing them up in the process. Buzz gets a lot of this stuff out of the box because it is so tightly tied with other products and services Google already offers.

You can comment on or "like" posts from others, which provides a more complete conversational tool than Twitter's homegrown @ or # adaptations. It's similar to Google Reader in that way, and in fact broadcasts items you share from Reader when you share them. You can go back and edit posts, or choose to e-mail them to others who don't have or use Buzz.

One of the neat things is that public posts can be viewed by location. So, I can choose to see updates from my contacts most of the time, but other times, such as when we are up here at a big event like the Olympics, I can switch to see what people nearby are buzzing about... and find out what fun stuff is happening nearby. A killer part of this feature is that it also integrates with Google Maps; so I can pull up a map that shows me exactly where people were when they made those posts. If I want, I can have it give me directions (by car, public transit, or on foot) right to that location.

You can also embed a picture in a Buzz post, or, Google's Picasa photo-sharing service automatically adds your recently posted pictures to the service.

Or, if you like, you can also set it up to add your activities from other popular sites like Flickr, Youtube, or Blogger (where this blog lives) automatically. Another site you can add to automatically update Buzz: Twitter.

I've always thought that is a great way to eat another company's lunch, and what it means is that it's easy for Tweeters to make the transition. With all the other features available, the personalization seems to me to be much more amenable to the sorts of friendly conversations that this sort of social networking tool should be about. In some ways, it's more like a Facebook feed in that way, but even more flexible.

But I don't actually believe the two services are in competition. Twitter has evolved, at least in terms of utility, into more of a marketing and informational site. It's public and web-based nature is a great way for companies to disseminate information and gain adherents to their message and products. Mechanisms the company has put in place to confirm identities and monetize the information stream are well-suited to corporate use. Genuinely useful social networking features make little difference to that sort of use.

Buzz, on the other hand, provides most of those features, and does so in a thoughtful, understated way that simply pulls people further into the Google Universe. I'm sure that many Twitter devotees will refuse to make the move, but it's worth noting that in terms of penetration, Twitter still has very little reach and the market for this sort of tool is wide open (although it's also worth pointing out that Gmail itself still has relatively small mass compared to other web-based mail services). I expect to see companies continue to adopt and use Twitter as part of their marketing and customer service strategy, but I think Buzz may be the place people end up if they are genuinely interested in keeping up with friends and associates and even just people nearby.