Tech News Beats

Avatars are popular on social networking websites and forums. They are really fun to represent yourself. So how about making an avatar of yourself. But most of the online avatar making services do not give a life like avatar of yours. Sp if you would like to make a true life like avatar of yours then visit, Avatara.com. Here, you can choose a pre-made avatar or you can create your own avatar by uploading a pictures of yours. Please note you will have to upload a picture containing only your face. To do so you can just crop the face from any picture which is facing straight in Picasa or any photo editing software. Make sure you read the picture requirements before uploading it or else it may not work.

This is not all, once you create your Avatar or select a pre-made avatar you can customize it, enter a message and share it on more than 30 social networking destinations. But to create your avatar you will have register here. But don’t worry, signing here can be even easier. You just need to use your open ID (Yahoo ID, Google ID, Flickr ID etc) to sign-up. However, if you do not have an Open Id, you will have to create an account in Avatara.com.

Google has come up with a new form social platform called Buzz in Gmail. With this your email inbox has become social. The basic idea is to allow you to see updates from few popular sites like your Twitter update, Youtube uploads, Flickr, if you have any website or blog, Blogspot(blogger) blog, Picassa and Google reader. As of now they are providing 8 connected sites. Buzz has been very recently pushed in Gmail and I saw it in Gmail just yesterday.

Google already has a social networking site Orkut then why introducing social features in Gmail? If you think little more it does makes sense. These days it not just bringing traffic to your website, it is how long you can retain traffic on your site. So what Google did is smart by thinking making Gmail social. Again, why socializing Gmail, they could have thought of integrating Orkut with Gmail. Google choose Gmail as the base because it already had a huge user base. These days there are so many social networking site, people would not like to take the pain of creating profile on another one unless it offers something path breaking.

Buzz will be liked by people who lives on social media and would like to be updated about what their friends or contacts do. However, the conservative ones with security and techies may putt of buzz as not extra – ordinary. However, is see there could be some concerns with Buzz though. As it seems people may be able to find whom you sending mails most and chatting with. What buzz tried to achieve is a mashup of Facebook and Twitter. As they have a friends following feature. However, when I opened Buzz for the first time, I see that I am already following 5 people and 4 people are following me automatically. From the trend of my usage of Gmail chat and email, I can say that these automatic follow-up addition has been made by Google Buzz depending on with whom I was chatting most and sending emails. However, if you do not like Buzz, you can turn off it on the footer of Gmail.

Buzz is also available on mobiles phones using the iPhone, Android OS cell phones and Google maps. The mobile phone version of Buzz offers many features. Google is planning to make Buzz a fully open social platform and working to make it more robust. Check what they are saying in their own words -

We’re building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API, and we invite developers to join us on Google Code to see what is available today and to learn more about how to participate.

Buzz has other interesting features too like it can find your location and voice recognition. But I have some wish list – I would like to see more sites are allowed in the connect sites section. In a way Buzz aggregates feeds from your favorite websites. You can even rate and comment on the updates on Buzz and email them to friends/contacts or anybody by clicking on the email option.

Read more from Google blog.