Google Buzz is a Twitter/Facebook type of sharing service in Gmail. You can communicate and share items of interest with your Gmail contacts and others you meet on Buzz. Conceptually, Buzz works very much like Facebook.

Buzz came out of nowhere on February 9th. No one, I mean NO ONE, saw Buzz coming. Google kept it totally under wraps until the day it was announced. None of the pundits or publications ever spoke of Buzz. This is certainly a tribute to Google’s ability to keep the wraps on their secret projects.

Buzz’s Potential
I believe it’s accurate to say that Buzz has the potential to facilitate communication in a way that’s nothing short of revolutionary. Why? Because it’s so tightly integrated with Gmail. Your Buzz updates go into your sent mail and buzzes you comment on are sent to your inbox. You can easily create filters to keep them out of the inbox, that’s your call. This tight integration provides a new type of email experience that you simply won’t find with other email services. Yes, Buzz is still a little rough around the edges and probably isn’t quite ready for mass adoption. I think it’s safe to say that Buzz is more for geeks like me at this early stage of the game.

Gmail Integration: Asset or Liability?
I also understand that most of you who are still hanging on to your Hotmail or Yahoo accounts are not likely not move to Buzz right away. I know how difficult it is for most people to embrace change like this, especially if the tools you’re using now work well for you. Heck, many of you are just now starting to use Facebook regularly and it’s been around a few years.

While I believe it’s awesome in terms of current and future product features for Buzz to be part of Gmail, I understand that this integration could also be a liability when you consider how many people are using other email services. My guess is that Google will offer Buzz as a standalone application for all you Hotmail and Yahoo mail users. This would be an application similar to Facebook that would not require you to be a Gmail user to post updates with Buzz. Undoubtedly you’ll need a Google account though, much the same as you must now sign-up with Facebook.

Perhaps once you start using Buzz you’ll find some good reasons to migrate to Gmail in order to enjoy the benefits of having full integration with your email service.

More About Buzz
Rather than rehashing what dozens of respected journalists and pundits have been saying about Buzz over the past week, I thought I’d highlight some of what I consider to be among the best writings to date about what Buzz is and what it might mean for you. If you want to learn more, give them a read.

What is Buzz?
Getting started with Buzz
Google Buzz in Gmail from the official Gmail blog
Google Buzz Brings Social Sharing, Aggregation to Gmail by Louis Gray
Most Popular Buzzers

Tips for Using Buzz
Millions of Buzz users, and improvements based on your feedback from the official Gmail blog
12 Undocumented Tricks for Google Buzz from aext.net
Google Buzz Tips from Google Operating System

Buzz News, Discussion, Criticism and Response from Google
Buzz on Mashable
Dèjá Google from Slate
A new Buzz startup experience based on your feedback from the official Gmail blog
Google Message Feature Moves Beyond Twitter from the NY Times

There are many more articles and discussions about Buzz. Watch my Buzz feed where I’ll be posting links to these and other resources to help keep you up to date what’s going on with Buzz.

Finally, turn Buzz off if it’s not for you.
If after reading about Buzz and playing with it some, you may decide that it’s just not for you. Or you may just decide that you have too much on your plate at this time to mess around with another social networking tool. Heck, some days it seems that just keeping up with your Facebook friends can be overwhelming. I understand. If you’re a Gmail user you can easily turn off Buzz. If you use Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, you can just ignore Buzz.

If you do ignore Buzz, promise me that you’ll take another look at Buzz in about 6 months. You’ll see a lot of changes by then and I believe, just like Facebook, Buzz it will become a resource you won’t want to be without. I have a feeling that you’ll eventually be won over to this versatile and promising technology. Google is going to give you lots of reasons to love it. I predict that eventually you’ll be Buzzing too.

I’ve written previously about a problem I’ve encountered recording video with the iSight camera on my MacBook Pro. I know that many people have experienced this problem, as I regularly get people doing a Google search for the solution landing on this post.

Last week I downloaded the latest version of QuickTime Player (ver 7.6 (472)) for my Macbook Pro running OS X 10.5.6. I was hoping it would resolve the problem of audio/video synchronization when recording in PhotoBooth or iMovie. Well, my unscientific tests reveal that the problem has not been resolved in PhotoBooth, but seems to be fine in iMovie. Take a look for yourself. First, the PhotoBooth video – FAIL!:

What did work well was File/Import from Camera in iMovie. This gives you the choice of capturing video and audio in either 16:9 mode (1024 x 576) or 4:3 mode (640 x 480) using the iSight cam and internal mic on your Macbook Pro. I captured the following video in iMovie in 640×480 mode, then Share/Export using QuickTime and selected the Movie to MPEG-4 format, setting the Options to H.264 and 320×240 resolution. This creates a good quality .MP4 file that is quite small in size, but still great quality for a webcam recording. The following short video was only 3MB in size, making for a quick upload to YouTube, even at my measly 3mb DSL speed that often runs very slow. The quality is there, the upload is fast, and the audio and video are definitely in sync. Hurray!

I also made a quick video using YouTube’s QuickCapture service. This avoids converting and uploading altogether. Check out the video quality compared to the above to see if the extra steps of recording with iMovie are really worth it. Again, this was captured using my relatively slow DSL connection. I think the quality is definitely acceptable once you get the volume control set properly.

So what do you think? Does the latest version of QuickTime underlying iMovie 8.0 fix the problem with audio and video sync so many MacBook users have experienced? I think it might. PhotoBooth still seems to be a problem, but iMovie does quite well. And I don’t think you should rule out Youtube’s QuickCapture service for recording webcam quality video.

Now you can subscribe to my posts by email. That’s right, you can read my posts where you get your other messages, in your inbox. Just enter your email address in the subscription box located on the right side of this page (NOT the orange RSS feed button). After you subscribe, you’ll get an email each evening containing my post(s) from that day.

I promise to do my best to entertain and inform you.

I’m following nearly 2,000 people on Twitter and nearly 1,300 are following me. Problem is that I don’t get to read a lot of the good stuff these folks tweet about. In fact, I miss most of it. Even with advanced Twitter clients like PeopleBrowsr and TweetDeck, I still have to work too hard to mine the tasty nuggets from the swiftly moving stream of tweets generated by the 2,000 people I follow.

FriendFeed is much more conducive to conversation around any given “tweet” than Twitter is. The ability to comment on a “message” is really nice and allows a true discussion to take place. You can quickly and easily read the message and its comments in context. With Twitter you have to go back to a person’s profile and try to figure out what someone was referring to, perhaps hours earlier, when they wrote an @reply that got your attention. With FriendFeed, the comment (Twitter @reply) is right there under the original message. Having the comments appear with the original message in FriendFeed might even reduce some of the stream noise in that the @replies are gone and now in the form of a comment. If I’m not interested in the original message, I don’t have to see the @replies at all. I just jump over the entire conversation.

Here’s the rub. I can only follow folks on FriendFeed who are on FriendFeed. If you are not on FriendFeed, I must try to keep up with you on Twitter. Even if you do all of your posting on Twitter, as I’ve been doing up to now, there is a way I can still keep up with you on FriendFeed. How? All you have to do is subscribe to your Twitter feed with your FriendFeed account and I’ll see it. In fact, I can even comment on your tweet in FriendFeed and have that comment appear in my Twitter stream. Yep, I can publish my FriendFeed messages and comments to my Twitter stream and you can read them there if you don’t want to read them in FriendFeed. As long as you have a FriendFeed account – you don’t even have to use it, just set it up – I can follow you from FriendFeed.

So let’s try this. If you’ve read this far, get a FriendFeed account and subscribe to me. I’ll subscribe back and follow your tweets there, rather than trying to follow you with a Twitter client. Let’s experiment to see if my following your tweets from FriendFeed facilitates more conversation between us due to my ability to follow you more closely than I ever could on Twitter. When you setup your FriendFeed account, be sure to subscribe to your Twitter account so your tweets appear in your FriendFeed. In a month or so I’ll do another post to talk about how its going. If you’re really brave, let’s talk about it on FriendFeed between now and then!

Some good reading about FriendFeed (both of these authors are big FriendFeed users and advocates):

FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users
Pull Your Blog Into FriendFeed and Increase Exposure

If you have a WordPress blog, you can add your own favicon that appears on your browser tab and on the left side of your browser’s web address bar. You’ll see mine above and I’ve also added one to Christine’s CrazyGoatLady.com. Oh yeah, they also appear when your site is Bookmarked or Favorited.

1. Find an image you want to use. If it’s a picture it should be a close-up, as the picture we’ll be making is very tiny.
2. Open it with a photo editor like Photoshop, iPhoto, etc.
3. Crop the image so it’s perfectly square.
4. Resize the image to 16 x 16 pixels at 72 dots per inch setting.
5. Save the image in a JPEG or GIF format.
6. Rename the saved image to favicon.ico
7. Upload to the “root directory” of your website. Also upload favicon.ico to the folder of your active theme. (wp-content/themes/YourThemeName).
8. Quit and restart your browser. You may also have to clear the cache from the Tools menu of the browser.
9. Load your website and smile when you see the picture displayed.

This is an unedited .mov file recorded with QuickTime after upgrading to OS X 10.5.6. What do you think? Is the problem fixed? What timing! Update: Changelog doesn’t mention Quicktime.

My plan for BigBaldGuy.com is to keep the daily message short and sweet using unedited webcam video. After experimenting with podcasting and social networking tools for a couple of years, I’ve learned that if I’m going to publish content on a daily basis it must be relatively effortless. The more complex the publishing process, the less likely I am to stick with it. It’s just too damn much work to produce a show like the SweatCast, for example. I may shoot some higher quality video when I’m out and about, but most days it will be my talking head on the webcam.

In the spirit of simplicity I chose to use my trusty Macbook Pro’s built-in iSight camera to record video in QuickTime, upload it to YouTube, and embed it in my posts. Sounds simple, right? It won’t be HD quality, but it will be good enough for my purposes here. Unless the audio and video don’t sync up. WTF??!! Whodathunk!

Here’s the original video recorded with QuickTime on my Macbook Pro. The audio and video are out of sync and it drives me crazy! I can’t publish videos like this. Watch just a little of it to see how bad it is.

Here’s the same video edited with QT Sync and saved as an MPEG-4 using the Broadband-High setting. I’ve adjusted the audio to advance 168 milliseconds. This video is much more enjoyable to watch:

I find the QT Sync video quality to be very good and using it allows me to record in my normal workspace with the Macbook Pro. Now I won’t have to schlep down to the basement to record in my dark studio on the iMac where I don’t experience this problem. I also need to be able to easily record when traveling, so I’m happy to have found a solution for the Macbook. While it’s great to have the problem solved, I’m still annoyed that I have to go through these extra steps. C’mon, Apple, let’s fix this problem and make QuickTime record it right the first time! Seems like a perfectly reasonable request, don’t ya think? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

Download from MacUpdate.com: QT Sync 0.3.3

Step by Step Fix
1. Download & install QT Sync (Mac only, I believe).
2. Record and save video with QuickTime.
3. Open video with QT Sync.
4. Adjust audio track to 168ms or whatever works best for your video. Change the setting on the fly to test.
5. Export the video into MPEG-4 format using the Broadband – High setting.
6. Play the exported .mp4 video in QuickTime to see that audio is now in sync with the video.
7. Upload to YouTube.

Credit to TechTicker for solving this problem for me. Thanks Mike!