Now that the Google event is over, the company has started turning on Buzz for Gmail users. Here are some quick screenshots of it in action.

See our live notes from today’s Google Buzz event here.

Google has a problem. Despite having their hands in just about everything online, they’ve never been able to tackle what is a key part of the fabric of the web: social. Yes, they have Orkut and OpenSocial, but no one actually uses them. Okay, some people use them, but not in the meaningful social ways that people use Facebook or even Twitter. Today, Google may have just solved their social problem.

Google Buzz is easily the company’s boldest attempt yet to build a social network. Imagine taking elements of Twitter, Yammer, Foursquare, Yelp, and other social services, and shoving them together into one package. Now imagine covering that package in a layer that looks a lot like FriendFeed. Now imagine shoving that package inside of Gmail. That’s Buzz. If Google Wave is the future, Google Buzz is the present.

FriendFeed Reborn. On Growth Hormone.

Fundamentally, Buzz is a stream of status updates, pictures, links, and videos from your friends. You can “like” these items and you can comment on them. And if you use Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader, or Twitter, you can also automatically have those items imported into your stream. And Buzz will recommend items you might like based on your friends’ activity.

Yes, again, it sounds a lot like FriendFeed. But it has a critical component that FriendFeed never had prior to its acquisition by Facebook: a massive installed user base. Maybe you missed the key bit of wording above: it resides inside of Gmail. Rather than trying to build its own new social service from scratch, Google is making Buzz a key part of their email service (right below the Inbox tab) that 176 million unique visitors each month, according to comScore.

Social Curation

Buzz also wants to differentiate itself another way: social curation. As Mike wrote about the other night, the social web right now is largely a mess. There’s simply too much going on, and no one is really working to sort it all out. Google is trying to do that with Buzz by allowing you to import items from services like Twitter, but only show you the best ones. For example, Google says it will hide quick messages like “brb.” The plan is to also auto-collapse items that don’t have a lot of comment activity.

For now, this data is sadly only a one-way street. That is to say, you won’t be able to update your Twitter account from Google Buzz, we’re told. But Google seems to be indicating that this functionality will be included eventually, and that overall they’d like the product to be as open as possible. And yes, there will be plenty of APIs. But one company noticeably absent from all this talk of importing and exporting data is the 800-pound social gorilla in the room: Facebook.

The Big Mobile Social Play

Listening to Google tell it, you’d almost think Buzz is just as much of a mobile product, as a social tool inside Gmail. And it just may be. Google is heavily touting the ability to use Buzz immediately on the mobile web if you’re using an Android phone or an iPhone. The reason they’re singling out those two phones is that their HTML5-compatible browsers support location. Location is a big component of Buzz on the go because Google not only want users to update their statuses, but to tag them with where they are when they leave it.

And while Google has its own location app, Latitude, Buzz works a lot more like Foursquare in that you select places to say where you are rather than a specific coordinate. This is an extension of the Places pages in Google Maps that were launched late last year. The use of Buzz alongside these locations make them ever more powerful. You can search to see only the Buzzes written from certain places, for example.

Buzz will also work within the Maps app on certain phones (such as Android phones, but not the iPhone — at least, not yet). And it will work inside the Google Search apps on the iPhone and Android. Perhaps the coolest thing about that is that you can use the voice search functionality to speak your buzz update if you just say “post buzz” and then say your buzz out loud.

Social Issues

Some big question marks remain for Google. First of all, one big reason they’ve flopped in the past with social implementation is because they seemed to have fundamentally flawed views about what a social graph should be. For example, when they first tried to make Google Reader more social, they automatically ported over your Gmail contacts to give you friends. The problem with this was that they auto-chose people who you were in contact with often based on emails and IMs. But in some case that may be your boss, or someone else that you’re not actually friends with.

With Buzz, Google is giving users more granular controls for friend settings, but they’re still suggesting people based on your Gmail social graph, which may or may not reflect your actual desired social graph.

Also, believe it or not, there are plenty of people without Gmail accounts. Are they going to sign up and start using an email service just because of Buzz? People certainly haven’t started using Yahoo Mail just because it added social features.

The One Stop Shop

Another problem Google has had when it comes to social elements is that they’ve never really had one place to let users share all their social data. Now they have that with Google profiles, which apparently, Google Buzz will be built into. Still, because Profiles are separate from Buzz in Gmail, it might be a little tricky for some users to figure out.

Complexity

Speaking of complexity, overall it’s another issue that Google Buzz may run into. Twitter works because it’s so simple, if you have a public account, your tweets go to anyone who is following you. Buzz is not that simple. There can be public or private buzzes. The plan is to also have buzzes for enterprise and educational users. In those cases, public buzzes may only be available within your company or school, while private would still be private to other individuals in your network. You can see how the social graph is starting to get a little more complicated.

Another thing is if someone comments on one of your buzzes, it will leave the Buzz area of Gmail and go into the Inbox area of Gmail, so you know someone is talking to you. That actually sounds pretty cool, and even better, you can reply right from there (another feature taken from FriendFeed), but I could also see that getting a bit confusing for some users.

The Battle

Without having had a chance to play with it yet, it would seem that the core idea behind Buzz is to take on Twitter and Facebook as the easiest way to share content online. Google is offering a number of compelling features such as smart curation (it gets better as you tell it what you like and what you don’t), and a rich mobile experience including location.

Because of the features it adds on to what Twitter does, and its overall look, it’s hard not to compare Buzz to FriendFeed. That service was arguably the better product than Twitter, but never took off in the same way for whatever reason (though I would argue that simplicity was a big factor). You could say the same thing for Twitter rivals Pownce and Jaiku (which Google actually bought) in the past. But by adding it to Gmail, Google is giving Buzz a great weapon to succeed where all of those others could not.

The big question is: will Gmail users buy into this quick sharing? Google thinks so because it’s a part of the evolution from email, to IM, to status updates. It’s also, in their eyes, a part of the evolution to the next step, Google Wave. So far, the public has proven to be not ready for Wave yet. But Buzz might be the perfect tool in getting people to think about communicating in a way beyond email and IM. Or it may be another misstep in Google’s social quest.

As location-based social networks gain serious traction, its inevitable that that these applications will become full-fledged platforms. Like Twitter, these networks can become ecosystems. Plus, they have a better chance of continuing to survive when Facebook enters the location ring. Foursquare released its API in November. And now Gowalla will has released its API today.

In a blog post announcing the API, Gowalla encourages developers to build out features that incolve location and the community, highlighting the recent addition of user-curated trips. Gowalla also suggested several uses of the API including an Indiana Jones Map (convert your road trip into an animated, epic adventure); Conference Games (encourage conference attendees to explore the city and get to know each other by tracking their check-ins and rewarding those who get off the beaten path); and LunchVote (Use LunchVote to decide on a nearby restaurant and track your history).

We originally reported on the impending release here, with Gowalla working on adjusting privacy setting for users as as third-party services start getting access to their data. Gowalla’s Josh Williams said that privacy controls are becoming more granular so that users can pick certain things to share while holding back others.

Foursquare, one of Gowalla’s main competitors, has already been partnering with developers to produce third-party apps. Photocheck.in, PlaceWidget and others are building innovative location centric applications off of the platform. It should be interesting to see what developers will do with Gowalla, especially considering its emphasis on virtual goods.

Google’s Street View has gone to many strange places, even off-road. But in preparation for the Winter Olympics it equipped a snowmobile with 360-degree cameras and took it to the top of Whistler, the Canadian ski resort where the Games will take place.

The slope-side views can be seen in the map on Google’s new Winter Olympics information page. Google should do this for all major ski mountains. It’s a great way to see if you really want to go up to the top of that double black diamond chair lift.

Here is a video showing how they got the images:

This morning, Google is hosting an event at its Mountain View, CA headquarters to show off a new social product it has been working on. Google VP of Product Management Bradley Horowitz, VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra, and product manager Todd Jackson are on hand to show it off.

Below, follow our live notes (paraphrased):

They’ve announced it will start in a few minutes, waiting for people in traffic, etc…

Horowitz: Exciting news to share this morning. This is exactly the right audience. Next 45 minutes to hour we’re going to be showing off something. I bet many of you are live-blogging this. That’s not really realtime cause I can talk faster than you can type. We’ll be talking about that. It shouldn’t be so much work to find the right audience for content you want to share. The moments of our life is the most precious time we have. We want tools to manage it better. Let’s take a walk through time and space.

Several years ago a couple of Yahoos thought they could organize the web. Soon they hired up 10,000 people to organize content. Then come algorithmic search engines. But it was still pretty bad. There was no relevance. It was still really hard to find things. 5 Years later came Google. We’re seeing the same thing with social sites now. But it’s even hard to find value cause there is too much noise. When you have 500 or 5,000 friends it’s very difficult. TMI, oversharing. There are lots of ways to define friends – that’s how you can have 5,000. And this will continue growing, and the problem will get worse and worse.

This is a large scale problem. A relevance problem. We like these kinds of problems. It’s like when we launched Gmail. Today it’s Google Buzz we’re launching. A Google approach to sharing.

Jackson: I’m really excited to show you what Buzz looks like built into Gmail. We started 5 years ago with our new approach to Gmail. First we grouped conversations. Then we added chat. Then we added video chat. Today will Google Buzz, we have a new way to share and communicate inside of Gmail. It’s a new world. I’ll focus on 5 key features.

1) Auto-following. We didn’t want users to have to peck out a totally new social graph. There has always been a giant social network under Gmail. You auto-follow the people you email and chat with the most.

2) Rich, fast sharing experience. Same nice Gmail UI and keyboard shortcuts. Special attention to media.

3) Public and private sharing. We want things Google can index, but also private messages.

4) Inbox integration. The inbox is the center for communication.

5) Just the good stuff. Some much social data, we need to filter the noise.

——–Demo————-

Buzz tab is right below the Inbox tab in Gmail. As you can see, there are a lot of people I’m already following. In Buzz you see links, you see photos and videos.

We made it great to show media inline. You can see full-size videos and photos. We want photos to be a first-class citizen in Buzz. We built a new kind of photo viewer (overlay viewer). See images from Flickr and Picasa Web. Sharing URLs is a breeze too. When you paste in a link, we gather headlines and photos from the sites that you can select.

Keyboard shortcuts work the same that they do in Gmail. You can Like things (just like FriendFeed). And you can comment on things.

As you can see in the post box, you can easily post things publicly or privately. Public things go to your followers and your Google Profile. And these are instantly indexed by Google.

But you can also post to private, including private groups. We heard this switching was too hard to do in other products. We wanted you to do both really easily.

Inbox integration. Any item in Buzz can become a conversation. (Ha ha people have figured out his email address and are emailing him.) We put these Buzz conversations into you Gmail inbox. And if someone comments while you’re looking at it in your inbox, comments come in in realtime. Things go to your inbox when people comment on your stuff, or when they comment on your comments. Also when someone @replies you – just like Twitter. When you type @ and an initial, you get an autocomplete to see who you want to send it to from your contacts.

So what about finding the best content? We have recommended Buzz. Say I’m not following someone who is a friend of my friend – we put that into the stream, and it will say why it’s recommended (friends commented on it). If you’re not interested click on the “not interested” link and we’ll learn about that. We collapse the bad Buzz too – things like “brb” which don’t mean much to you.

Our strong belief is that organizing the world’s social information is a huge problem. The kind that Google loves to solve.

We’re going to shift gears now and talk about Mobile. We wanted to go a step beyond simply shrinking down our site.

Gundotra: If you liked what Todd just showed you – I think you’re going to love the things that take Buzz beyond Gmail. The early web had millions and millions of web pages. Google realized that you could study the links with PageRank. Today, we’re seeing the same phenomenon with social expressions. We asked ourselves in the real world, how do we find relevancy? Think about your own phone conversations – it’s subliminal so you might not realize it: You ask someone: Where you at — Location.

In the digital world we have not yet utilized location the way we do in the real world. Part of it is because computers think about location differently than we do. They think in lat/long, we think of Places. Google has half a decade investment in location tech. We have Latitude, new Places for Google Maps – we have 50 million of these. Now I’d like to show you three new product experiences for Buzz.

1) Go to google.com on your iPhone or Android phone web browser.

When you click on Buzz on the Google homepage, we find your location with your phone’s GPS – we take the lat/long and recommend a place we think you’re at. So how does this work indoors? The same technique but we use time or day, and things nearby you to guess where you are. It’s very smart. You can also use voice input to post to Buzz.

2) New application for Buzz.

This is a web app that works on Android or the iPhone. It’s a stream-like view for Buzz items. We have a new version of the Place page so show you a summary of a place. Watch the performance, it’s almost instant. There’s a tab called “Nearby” – maybe you’re at a concert and you want to see what people are saying about it. Just hit this button and we’ll show all the public buzz that’s close to you.

3) Update to Google Maps for mobiles (Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian today – other phones to come later)

There’s a brand new Buzz layer. This is nicely integrated to pull your location. We geotag buzzes. You can also post pictures right from Google Mobile Maps – again, geotagged. You can see white chat bubbles that show Buzz elements on the map.

Horowitz: In the third quarter we like to show a video.

———–Here’s a Buzz video demo.————–

Connect to other sites you use – including Twitter.

But wait, there’s more. As many of you know, we have a thriving Enterprise business. We’ve been testing this internally and it’s changed the way we’ve communicated. We’re announcing that we will launch this for business – not today, but coming soon.

We’re also big on standards. Things like PubSubHubbub, and Web Finger. We’re going to do everything we can to make this play nice with the ecosystem.

We’re launching in 9.5 minutes. It will begin to roll out to Gmail users. The journalists are in the first batch. You should have that at 11 AM PT. For the rest of the world it will happen over the next few days.

Finally, we’re just getting started. We’re not done. We’re going to put the product in market and get feedback.

Sergey Brin now on stage for the Q&A.

Q: What about privacy and stalking?

TJ: We want you to share publicly and privately easily. If you need to, you can block users too.

Q: Is there overlap with Google Wave?

BH: Absolutely. A lot of this in inspired by Wave. We want integration with Wave.

Q: What about Latitude?

VG: We launched Latitude a year ago. You can use both, this is a new layer.

Q (from Steve Gillmor): As you know, FriendFeed was bought by Facebook – but it looks like you got all the features (funny).

TJ: We try not to pay attention to competitors. Sharing was the next logical step to add to Gmail.

VG: We want to make this the model for sharing and openness. That means open APIs. We’re working with PubSubHubbub to open this data too.

Q: So you will be making APIs available by Google I/O?

VC: Public feeds are already available today and we’ll make more available.

Q: How is this public info tied to Google Profiles.

TJ: Everything public will show up on Profiles immediately. And it will show up in in Google search results instantly.

Q: Facebook Connect?

TJ: Nothing to announce at this time – but we’ll think about it.

Q: What about Google Voice?

VG: We’re definitely thinking about that too. All the products really.

Q: What about social services, why has Google been behind?

SB: Social has been transitioning. Look at us with Orkut, we’ve had success – this is just the next evolution. Other social things focus on entertainment, I find it useful for productivity.

Q: What about Facebook – how does take it on?

BH: Like what Sergey was saying, I think there is an opening to have a revolution with this. Make social products useful for productivity, for example.

Q: Is this about supplanting Twitter or Facebook with your algorithm?

TJ: In Buzz you can connect Twitter and Flickr from outside, and those can become recommended items.

Q: Can you write back to Twitter?

TJ: Not yet, but eventually you’ll be able to. Right now you can just pull in.

Q: What about spam?

BH: Ha yes, we think about this.

TJ: Fundamentally you see content from people you’re following so it’s harder for spammers to get to you.

Q: What about other sites you can connect to Buzz?

TJ: A few like Twitter and Flickr will be really easy to import. But we made it any feed you have on your profile too.

Q: How do you use it internally?

SB: I recently wrote an op-ed about the Google Books project. It’s hard when it’s just one point of view. So instead I posted it to Google Buzz and I had 50 or more comments. I did a general edit based on my feedback.

Q: Will Buzz elements appear higher on Google Search pages?

TJ: It’s the same way we do other social elements on search pages. We don’t do anything special to promote it.

Q (from Steve): What about track?

TJ: There are many cool ideas, we’re not sure exactly what to use yet. But that’s interesting.

Q: Can you talk a bit more about corporate customers?

BH: Nothing more today – but soon. It’s a V 1.something release. We’re drowning with possibilities with this product.

Q: If Orkut was more successful in the U.S. would you have built Buzz?

SB: When I was in high school I ran a BBS, it’s sort of like these services – it was horribly unsuccessful. I made poor choices. But as the Internet has evolved, we’ve seen things of the social nature evolve. There have been hundreds of iterations of communications online. This is part of a longer term evolution.

Thank you, and we’ll see you on Buzz. The End.

DotNetNuke Corporation, the owner and maintainer of the open source web application framework that goes by the same name, has raised $8 Million Series B funding from new investor UV Partners and prior backers August Capital and Sierra Ventures.

The company had earlier raised an undisclosed amount of financing from the latter two investors back in November 2008.

DotNetNuke offers a flexible Web Content Management Platform for Microsoft .NET, available in a free Community and subscription-based Professional, Elite and Elite Premier Editions (click here for more info). DotNetNuke’s CMS is extensible and customizable through the use of skins, modules, data providers, language packs and templates.

DotNetNuke says the new funds will be used to accelerate product development and expand marketing and sales, after a year of stellar performance. The company recently claimed that it has signed 500 paying customers and 50 certified commercial partners since launching commercially in February 2009.

In 2009, DotNetNuke acquired Snowcovered, the premier online market for over 6,000 DotNetNuke modules, skins, services and related products offered by nearly 800 third-party vendors. The company says that the online marketplace has since completed nearly 40,000 transactions to almost 15,000 customers last year.

Sequoia-backed voice messaging company Bubble Motion is getting into the microblogging space today, that is the voice-based microblogging space. The startup is launching Bubbly, a voice-blogging social network built for mobile phones.

With Bubbly, you can record and broadcast messages from any mobile device. When a users records audio messages and updates, followers can listen in whenever they want. To start voice-blogging, you enter a short code onto your phone, and start recording your messages. To follow another voice-blogger, users dial the phone number for whomever they want to follow. Whenever there’s a new audio update, followers are notified via SMS with instructions on how to listen. Bubblers can also control who can listen to their messages, and have the option of masking their actual phone number to prevent followers from calling them directly. Deployed through partnerships with mobile operators, Bubbly is an extension of BubbleTalk, a click, talk, and send’ messaging service that doesn’t require any calling.

The idea is slightly wacky, but has already been released in markets in Asia and has accumulated 150,000 users in India over the past week. I could see Bubble being used in markets where mobile device usage is higher than internet usage on a computer. And Bubbly could be used for celebs to stay close to fans. Bubbly is currently partnering with mobile operators in India and has launched with regional and national Indian celebrities using voice-blogging using Bubbly. India seems like a perfect market for Bubbly, especially considering the success and rapid growth of the Indian Twitter-like SMS microblogging network, SMS GupShup.

Bubble Motion, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., has raised a total of $35 million in funding since the company’s launch in 2003.

Over the past 48 hours, and perhaps longer, it appears that TechCrunch is being blocked inside China. We’ve confirmed this with contacts and tipsters inside China who can no longer access our site, as well as through Web tools such as WebsitePulse and Just Ping which pings sites from inside China’s Great Firewall.

Both of those services indicate that, at least in Shanghai, readers cannot connect to TechCrunch. Chinese readers have reported problems accessing the site in the past as well.

If you are located in China and you can read this, please let us know in comments.

We are not really sure why we are being blocked. Recently, we’ve covered Google’s decision to to perhaps stop doing business in China following a cyberattack on its servers in the country, but we don’t think that is it.

Another possibility, which borders on the absurd, is that on Friday Michael put up a humorous post comparing a Google employee who stopped his SUV because he was talking on his cell phone to the Tank Man who famously blocked Chinese tanks at Tiananmen Square. The title of the post: “A Googler Has His Tiananmen Square Moment.” He followed up with another light weekend post, featuring pictures of him and Robert Scoble re-enacting the incident. That post also had the word “Tiananmen” in the title.

They were just goofing off, but perhaps the Chinese government didn’t think it was funny. China still has a policy of wiping out all references on the Web to the Tank Man and the Tiananmen uprising of two decades ago. China blocked Twitter on the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen last summer, and has blocked Facebook, Bing and other sites during times of unrest. Our post hardly compares.

Again, to be clear, this is all speculation on our part. We don’t know exactly why we are being blocked. There are so many ways we could have offended officials in China. If a Chinese censor is reading this (and we know you are) please let us know what we did via comments or an email.

Photo credit: Flickr/ Michael Mooney

As I sit here listening to Ben Cohen’s radio documentary about how he nearly became a teenage dotcom millionaire, I’m reminded of how tedious us journalists all found him back in the late 90s. We don’t now of course – now that’s he’s grown up and actually turned out to be a pretty good tech reporter for Channel 4 News, and quite an OK guy, I’d quite happily have a pint with him.

But the story of how he became a teenage dotcom (paper-only) millionaire and finally fell to earth has something to tell us about the nature of startups and Europe and why we must finally kill off the myth of the Dotcom Hero CEO. In 2010 there is no more room for dumbass Internet heroes. From now on we must focus on products, teams and businesses. Sure there will always be “the story” about a startup, or how it started with one person’s idea. But as soon as that becomes their focus that are quite simply dead. Ideas are two-a-penny, it’s execution that counts, and you can’t execute anything totally on your own.

In May 2009, we covered the launch of Fotomoto, a Web-based photo monetization service built by the eponymous startup based out of San Francisco.

The product has grown a lot since then, and founder & CEO Ahmad Kiarostami informs us that they have signed up 2800 website publishers since launching publicly, which translates to some 610,000 photos to date.

Some of these publishers are big names – Mirror.co.uk for instance uses Fotomoto to monetize its photographs on-site.

Fotomoto’s website has recently received a make-over, and now doubles as a browser-based marketplace where photographers and publisher can promote and sell images, in addition to having Fotomoto power the payment capabilities on their own and third-party websites. When people add photos to their own sites, Fotomoto’s toolbar sends out a notification, after which new pictures are automatically added to the marketplace on Fotomoto.com.

The startup refers to this decentralized way of selling photos online as self-commerce or “CafePress inside-out”, both of which terms reflect perfectly what the service is all about.

(By the way: if you haven’t gotten your significant other something for Valentine’s Day yet, the startup is running a special right now with custom prints, cards, & e-cards on display.)

Fotomoto has raised $623,000 so far from investors like Amidzad Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, but Kiarostami for the first time disclosed that Mehdi Maghsoodnia – former COO / VP of CafePress and currently CEO at BookRenter – has also participated in its second funding round, as well as joined the startup as a Board member.

In addition, SGN founder and Chairman Shervin Pishevar made a minor investment and signed up as an advisor to the company. Another noteworthy advisor on the list is Touraj Parang, co-founder and COO of Jaxtr.

Keep a good eye on this one.