Google has announced the launch of Buzz, a new feature for Gmail that makes the email service more social for users.
The aim of the offering is to allow users to interact more with their existing email contacts by enabling them to follow these friends and share content like links, photos and videos.
It provides the ability to connect to Flickr and Twitter through Gmail and have a more location based online experience when accessing Google Buzz from a mobile phone.
The launch comes after the Google Wave experiment, which also combines email with other functions such as content sharing and chat, was unveiled by the search engine last year.
Google also recently took steps to make its core search offering more social media friendly by including real time updates from Twitter and other sites in its results, as well as releasing the Social Search feature to display listings from users' friends.
The Buzz service will be rolled out to all Gmail accounts over the course of the next few days.
"Our belief is that organising the social information on the web - finding relevance in the noise - has become a large scale challenge, one that Google's experience in organising information can help solve," says Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, on the Official Google Blog.
