Sergey Brin Used Google Buzz To Write His NYT Op-Ed On Google Books

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in... → Learn More

During the Q&A session today following the Google Buzz event, Google co-founder Sergey Brin revealed something both humorous and interesting. When asked a question about practical uses for Google Buzz, Brin noted that he actually used the service to help him write his op-ed about Google Books that ran in the New York Times last year.

Brin noted that he was having difficulty with the article because it’s just his one point of view. So he put out his draft on Google Buzz (which Google was testing out internally within the company at the time), and quickly got dozens of comments. Brin then used this feedback to edit his article.

What’s interesting here beyond Brin crowd-sourcing the writing of his important article, is that they’re apparently using Google Buzz internally in much the way that Google Wave has been set up: As a realtime collaboration tool. Of course, other Googler’s couldn’t edit Brin’s article within Buzz, but instead could comment on it in realtime. This goes along with what I wrote earlier, that Google seems to be positioning Buzz as a step towards Wave. In fact, when asked specifically about Wave, Google VP of Product Management Bradley Horowitz noted that Buzz was actually “inspired” by Wave.

Product: Google Buzz
Website: buzz.google.com
Company Google

Google Buzz is a social network and sharing product built by Google. Based within Google Profiles, Buzz offers a stream of status updates, pictures, links, and videos from your friends. You can “like” these items and you can comment on them. Updates from Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader, or Twitter can also be automatically imported into a Buzz stream. Buzz will recommend items you might like based on your friends’ activity. Buzz Features include: Buzz Online Auto-following: Buzz allows users can auto-follow...

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Product: Google Wave
Website: wave.google.com
Company Google

Google Wave is a tool for communication and collaboration on the web, launching in the second half of 2009. Google announced that they would discontinue new development on Google wave in August 2010. In Google Wave, users create and invite other people to “waves”. Everyone on a wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing,...

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