Google Retires Google Buzz

Google Buzz was a social networking service that Google integrated into the company's web-based email product Gmail. Google Mail users were able to make use of Buzz to share messages, photos, videos and other information with their Gmail contacts or the public.

Google Buzz was a first attempt to compete with successful social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Buzz's was heavily criticized for its default privacy settings in the beginning which revealed names of Gmail contacts publicly or the exact location of a mobile user who posted updates on Buzz.

Google made the decision to retire Google Buzz shortly after the release of the new social networking site Google+. The decision was announced on October 14 that Google Buzz would be shut down along with the Buzz Api in a few weeks. A Google Buzz help page explains the consequences of retiring the service.

Google Buzz is going away, but your posts are yours to keep

In a few weeks we'll be retiring Google Buzz. At that time you won't be able to create any new posts, but your existing content will remain accessible [..]

There are two locations where Google Buzz users can access their past messages and posts. First in the Google Profile under the Buzz entry

There you see all posts of Buzz users as well as comments and likes if you are the owner the the Google+ profile.

The second option is to use Google Takeout, Google's data exporting service, to download Google Buzz data to a local computer system. Google Takeout can be accessed here.

The service generates a file and size listing of the Google Buzz data. The scan may take a while depending on the number of posts a user has made on Google Buzz. A click on create archive prepares the selected data so that it can be downloaded to the local system in the end. Each post on Buzz is stored as a html document inside a zip.

Have you been using Google Buzz? (thanks Roman Sharp for the tip)

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