Google has revealed its latest foray into the social space: a tool called Google Buzz that integrates with Gmail.

The basic idea is similar to the feed on a Facebook user's home page: Buzz allows a user to see a stream of comments, links, photos, and videos that have been shared with friends. But while the interface looks familiar, Google could have a real advantage in tying Buzz to other successful products to beef up its functionality and adoption. The company also seems to have been working hard to identify and solve several problems inherent to existing social networks.

Gmail users will be automatically subscribed to 40 people based on their e-mail and chat behavior. The Buzz page (already available to some users) will show items shared by these people, and it will also recommend items that a user might be interested in, even if those items were posted in their extended network. As with Twitter, a Buzz user can direct an item to a specific person by using an @reply. This sends the item to the friend's inbox, where it functions as a "live object," updating in real-time as others comment on it.

Whenever social sites like Twitter are discussed, the issue of signal-to-noise typically comes up, and Google seems to have a plan for that too: using location information to help decide which posts are most relevant to a user.

Buzz will also help users control who sees the items they share. Todd Jackson, product manager for Google Buzz, notes that "many users use one product to share things publicly and a separate product to share things privately." Buzz, on the other hand, has been built with a user interface that makes it easier to flip back and forth between public and private, in the hope that users will use it to perform both functions.

Google has also announced three efforts to promote Buzz on mobile phones. First: a mobile app for both the iPhone and Android; second: links to Buzz on Google's mobile home page; and third: integration of Buzz with Google Mobile Maps so that users can see items posted near a location. For the mobile versions of Buzz, users can also choose whether to have Google rank posts based on social considerations or proximity. Selecting the "nearby" option within Buzz shows items posted near the user's current location, regardless of whether they were posted by a friend.

Google says that Buzz will reach most Gmail users within the next few days; the mobile application is available at buzz.google.com.

During a press conference held in Mountain View, executives said there were many great opportunities to integrate Buzz with Google Wave. But to my eye Buzz takes many of the attractive features of Wave offered and pulls them into products that people actually use. This seems like a better way of executing these ideas.

The announcement also demonstrates the keenness of Google's recent push into real-time search. Google executives have said in the past that it's hard to determine the best ways to rank tweets. But having better access to information on user's social behavior will help the company rank trending items on its search page (which is, after all, still its main product).

A new plug-in from Google called Chrome Frame, released on Tuesday, makes Internet Explorer 8 run 9.6 times faster, according to benchmark tests done by Computerworld.

According to the Computerworld article, Google released the plug-in so that IE users would see better performance when using an as-yet unreleased tool called Google Wave. The plug-in, which users can download here, installs a version of the Javascript engine and HTML 5 functionality from Google's own browser, Chrome, inside IE (it doesn't work with all web pages, however).

Microsoft has responded to this rather embarrassing blow by stating that the Google Chrome Frame introduces severe security issues. In an interview with ARS Technica, which has a skeptical take on that claim, a Microsoft spokesperson says:

"Given the security issues with plugins in general and Google Chrome in particular, Google Chrome Frame running as a plugin has doubled the attach area for malware and malicious scripts. This is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take."

At the Google I/O developer conference today, Google demonstrated a new product called Wave that essentially combines e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, discussion boards, and collaborative documents into one Web service. Created by the developers of Google Maps, Wave works within a Web page, using HTML 5 capabilities supported by browsers like Chrome and Firefox. Lars and Jens Rasmussen and product manager Stephanie Hannon showed off the sprawling capabilities of the product to enthusiastic developers during the keynote presentation.

Still very much a work in progress, Wave will launch publicly later this year. But the features showed off during the demo were impressive.

Wave can be used as an e-mail service, and it even looks something like Gmail, which organizes e-mails based on the conversation thread, but it can also turn into an instant-messaging service on the fly, depending on who in the thread is online. Dragging and dropping photos into a message shares them almost instantly. Wave can also be integrated into blogs and connect to services like Twitter; comments posted by you and others can show up on your Wave homepage, giving the product the potential to collate all of your disparate conversations around the Web.

Additionally, Wave can be used to create, share, and edit documents within a message, just as one would write an e-mail. These updates can be viewed by collaborators in real time, and a feature called playback allows people to view each change one at a time, although the default mode is set to see the document after the most recent edit.

Importantly, Google released an application programming interface for developers today so that they can build gadgets that plug into Wave, similar to the way that add-ons work in Web browsers. The examples of gadgets included collaborative sudoku and chess games, but it's easy to imagine all the types of applications found on Facebook translating to the Wave environment. Another demonstrated gadget was a semantic spell checker that analyzed the phrase "open a can of been soup" and suggested "bean" instead of "been." And Lars Rasmussen showed off a real-time translator that converted his English instant messages into French, and his friend's French messages into English.

It remains to be seen, however, how most Internet users will perceive the product. If they see it as yet another way to have a real-time interactive conversation, à la Twitter, they might reject it. A balance will need to be struck between speed and constant interruptions, admits Rasmussen.

Another potential challenge that Wave will need to overcome is the fact that it is truly a sprawling collection of features, capable of doing so much. This will make it difficult to package as a product. In the case of Wave, it seems as though Google is betting on its developers to build simple applications that can help consumers get the idea.