Phantom Maelstrom

The once promising social networking, microblogging and messaging tool from Google integrated into the company's web-based email program, Gmail, is scheduled for permanent shut down on or after November 14.

Buzz was one of those Google products since Wave that had been perceived as Google's attempt to compete with social networking websites like Facebook and microblogging services like Twitter. Unfortunately, despite the innovative features present with the service, it wasn't able to grab the attention of users using the latter services.

Among the features present on Buzz were the capability to share post publicly or privately with the inclusion of a "Like" button (similar to Facebook), Inbox Integration (Gmail), capability to share photos from popular sites, connect with sites like Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, and Google Reader, see updates in real time, and the capability to share interesting posts and weed out ones likely to skip.

Google announces on their blog that the service would permanently cease to operate, however, they are giving the option to save previous posts that enables users to migrate their buzz shout outs. Google also said that the reason why they abandon the service is so that they can focus more on the new service Google+.