Have you tried out Google Buzz yet?

I can know Darren Rowse has, after seeing his Buzzes this afternoon.

I also know Ange Recchia has, since she popped into Buzz today too.

I even had a look at the 'Nearby' tab in the mobile version this afternoon and was surprised to see there's a few in the inner suburbs of Melbourne already getting some practice at it.

Interestingly, though, I didn't recognize these people as Twitter regulars.  Then again, you don't always know people's names from quick glances of Twitter nicks.

I'm intrigued to know what people are using Buzz in its first few days and who's not.

Apart from a handful of people among my regular Twitter friends, there doesn't seem to be too big a buzz in local Twitter for it as yet.  Perhaps that's because Buzz is technically a competitor to Twitter.  Contrasted to that are the people I know from Friendfeed who are enjoying the similarities to their old service.

So let's here some feedback on what the average Twitter user thinks of Buzz.

And yes, I'll be quite happy to hear any "buzz" joke you can think of.

The first day using Google Buzz shows it's everything we would like Wave to be.

It's fast, for one thing.

As yet, I'm still waiting for my Gmail account to be connected to Buzz and about the only practice I'm getting on it is through the mobile version. Even so, I'm liking what I see.

When the Gmail connection is live, I'll be able to take a better look at what it's like for sharing pictures and/or video.  In the meantime, I'm already noting how Mashable is already using Buzz to give updates on their articles.  They're already doing something constructive with it there.

So far it's been good to join some conversations with Google Reader contacts and in this regard, it's much like Friendfeed, a service I'm still active on.  So if I've picked up Friendfeed pretty well, the learning curve for Buzz will be quite minimal.

Google profile is where I'm seeing my updates the best, with Buzz threads showing up currently as messages containing one thread, as opposed to one small message.  As I'm still waiting for the full connection on any other computer, there's a limit to how much I can describe, although the mobile Buzz web app is a good start.

The mobile interface is very effective, but it took a few minutes to work out I had to click on the thread-starter's profile to be able to add a coment or a like.

As you first login to the mobile version of Buzz, a small popup tells you how to turn it into a mobile bookmark on your iPhone's homescreen.  From there you can read through your contacts' buzzes or you can check who's updated nearby.

It's only the first day of Buzz yet, but it's off to a good start as far as I'm concerned.

As a "Wave Lite," Buzz works.

I received a HTC Magic for my birthday and for a few weeks both my partner and my iPhone were jealous of the time I spent with it.

My missus' response wasn't exactly helped by the term used for 'jailbreaking' an Android-based phone.  In America it's a pretty innocent term, relating to gaining root access to the filesystem on such a phone and getting a bit more functionality out of it..  Here in Australia, the term is a euphemism for horizontal tango.

So telling my partner I was thinking of "rooting the android" got quite a nasty look from her.

I would not be at all surprised if Australian readers all keeled over laughing at the above sentence.  However, our Yankee friends would be asking why we were all laughing.

That said, I'm back to spending more time with both my partner and my  iPhone this week, although I've been keeping up on some developments for the Magic and other Android devices.

The Android OS for mobile phones is a Linux variant, though today's news points out that it is forking just a tad too much from the main Linux development.

At the heart of any Linux distribution is the kernel, which helps the hardware and the software communicate and interact.  You fine-tune any Linux distribution to your specific hardware by re-compiling the kernel and adjusting things more specifically.  The Wikipedia article linked to just above gives a more detailed explanation.

Up to now, Android utilized the 2.6 version of the Linux Kernel and there had been Google code contributed back into the community kernel.  Today that code was removed.

There are some things specific to Android you don't find in other Linuxes.  Android does not use X-Windows as its graphic interface, for example. One viewpoint for that and other difference between Linux and Android is explained here. Then there's the C programming language.  It isn't officially supported on Android, whereas it's key to almost all Linuxes. Instead it uses bionic.  Even the virtual machine differs from standard Java, using the Dalvik Virtual Machine and not supporting implementations of Java even found on Nokia phones.

All that aside, Android driver code is differing so much from the main Linux Kernel tree that there would be incompatibilities if it were a part of the main kernel.  There may or may not be some amount of politics to it, but in the end just the examples above show where you can't call it a mainline Linux.  It'll be up to the Google and Linux people to sort it out from there.

Kind of makes me glad I just utilize an Android phone, not develop for it.