ReadWriteWeb

Google announced today the closure of a number of services it's offered for years, including the much-maligned social network Buzz. Buzz wasn't just forgotten, though. It wasn't just a pre-cursor to Google Plus. It wasn't just rolled out awkwardly in February, 2010.

It was, according to the US Federal Trade Commission, an egregious enough violation of consumer privacy that all of Google will now be subject to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years. Many people still don't believe that Buzz violated anyone's privacy at all. I think it's important, as Buzz fades into the sunset of history, that such opinions be reconsidered and Buzz's wrongdoing be taken seriously. Lest it be repeated and so that social software can be built effectively in the future.

Google Plus doesn't have a public API yet, nor has it announced when one will be available. But if you want to find out about future developer opportunities, Google has a mailing list you can sign-up for to receive more information in the future.

Developers are already clamoring for an API, which is a good sign for Google Plus. Mohamed Mansour commented "Would be nice if there was a Google+ API. I would have made a Buzz to Google+ importer today."

New for some, not seen by all - yet - Google has added "Shared By" and "Recent Update" elements to search result pages. Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan points out that some people's results are now coming up with socially-engaging teasers such as "shared by 5+" next to news stories. Even more intriguing, a blue "recent updates" box is appearing to offer results from Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and more.

Using algorithms to give personalized recommendations is hard. A lot of online services try to leverage their users' social graphs to determine the stories, books, songs or movies that are potentially of interest to them. Given that your own interests can be quite different from those of your friends, though, these systems are often limited. my6sense, on the other hand builds a personalized and constantly evolving profile for all of its users and provides recommendations purely based on what its algorithm thinks is most likely to be interesting to you. Starting today, Android users will be able to find the most interesting items in their RSS, Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz feeds with the help of My6Sense.

They say that the worst part of a dying relationship has nothing to do with love or hate. It's the indifference that can be excruciating. When the other party does not care.

That may be the sad lesson we are seeing with Google Buzz. Services that are soaring in popularity will get oodles of attention for every feature that is added. Services that are fading get almost no buzz at all.

Google Apps, GMail and Google Maps garner excitement for new features. We write about them here on the pages of ReadWriteWeb as do other blogs and news organizations. Google Buzz is getting no attention at all. No one cares when it launches a new feature for developers.

Before now, PostRank, the popular social media analytics service, had to manually crawl all Google Buzz accounts and subscribe to the public feeds it found separately prior to meshing that information with the rest of its data. It was unlikely that all the public feeds made it into PostRank and the process "imposed a high server tax for both sides."

Now, however, with the Google Buzz firehose, PostRank subscribes to one real-time PubSubHubbub feed of all publicly-available Google info. PostRank's users, the company says, will notice a big difference in the amount and depth of Buzz content.

Miio is a new microblogging service which is a bit like a mashup between Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and an RSS reader. Now typically, we don't like describing services as a "it's like a this plus a that," but Miio is precisely the kind of service that needs a little help in the "what this is" department.

Don't get us wrong, the concept itself isn't bad: a discussion board built around interests as opposed to popularity. It's just that the execution makes the service seem a little confusing.

So what is miio? That's what we're trying to figure out today.

Yesterday we delivered our half-year report for the Web. In that post we summarized some of the highlights of the first half of this year: the launch of the iPad in January, Google Buzz arriving in February, Facebook's Open Graph platform announcement in April, the release of iPhone 4 in June, Twitter's World Cup features in June, and more.

We'd now like to poll you on which of these - or other - products or platforms has impressed you the most over 2010. You may cast up to 3 votes in the poll below.

Google announced today that it has enabled a Google Maps preview in both Gmail and Google Buzz.

Now, instead of pasting a Google Map into an email you send, any Google Maps URL and any U.S. address (for the time being) you enclose will automatically come with a map embedded.

Google Buzz just got a new feature that is very similar to Twitter's retweet functionality. Over the course of the day, Google will roll out a Reshare button for Buzz, which will allow you to easily share interesting posts you find on Buzz with your followers there. These posts can be shared both publicly and privately. According to Google, this was one of the top user requests for Buzz. It is also a good example of the incremental updates the Buzz team has made over the last three months.