Recently, Internet giants Google have announced two new services – Google Buzz and Google Broadband. Let’s look at both of them.

Google Buzz
This new idea is Google’s solution to social sharing – Built into Google Mail. You may think that this is quite similiar to Google’s other product, Google Wave. In fact, you’d be right. Buzz, however, aims to enable users to share photos, videos, links and status updates with other people, quite like Twitter does.

Google Buzz is actually live right now so if you log into Google Mail, you should see a new link in the sidebar called Buzz. Once clicked, you’ll notice a Twitter-like layout. It actually works in the same sort of way – You enter a short message into the box and it submits it to all of your friends. You can see all of your friends’ messages below it.

Some people would see it as a half-way point between normal e-mail and Google Wave. It’s a different way of communicating online in a unique way, which links e-mail, Twitter and Wave all together into one nice package. Although I personally won’t use this new feature, it’s great that Google are continuing to expand on their free services offered to users on the internet.

Google Broadband
Just to note to start with, Google Broadband is not the official name of this project, I believe. Google have announced that they will be providing internet broadband to over 500,000 communities in the United States. This won’t just be any normal broadband – It’s ultra-quick. The speed claimed by Google is to be 1gbps, which is a huge improvement in speed. For example in the United Kingdom, the highest speed available at the moment is 50mbps, which means Google’s broadband would be 20x quicker!

The main reason Google has given for this new idea is to get more people using the internet. In turn, this would also increase Google’s profits because they would get more users purchasing advertising from their Search Network. Of course, this is one service that Google cannot provide completely free, so they have said that they will provide very competitive prices on their broadband. They have also said that they will have open access on their network, so that users will have a choice of different service providers.

This new service is to be tested in the United States near the end of the year. Later on in the year, Google will decide the chosen sites which will be allowed to test the new service and then hopefully they’ll release it officially next year, maybe even reaching to different countries. There has been no official word on their public release date and reaching internationally, though.