The portal differs from Twitter in a number of ways but most obviously Buzz has no character limit, as opposed to Twitter’s rigid 120 characters. Twitter is also very 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, and Google plans to have buzzes for enterprise and educational users, allowing public buzzes to only be available within your company or school.

With a high percentage of users accessing social media platforms on the move, it is no surprise that Google Buzz can be used on an iPhone or Android-based web browser. It contains a GPS feature, allowing the program to find a location nearest to you it thinks you would like to visit. Mobile users can also post content to Buzz using voice commands.

The good, bad and downright ugly have been reported, but the biggest question raised was concerning the issue of privacy within Buzz. With the privacy settings initially set to public by default, this meant every profile was open to access, and potentially follow, via search engines.

Over the weekend, Google announced significant changes to Buzz, responding to the criticism over privacy. Google moved away from the system in which Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with most. Instead, they have adopted an auto-suggest model, in which you are shown your friend list with an option to de-select people before publishing the list. While a full opt-in model would be less likely to result in inadvertent disclosures of private information, this is a significant step forward.

The security problems arose because Google attempted to overcome its market disadvantage in competing with Twitter and Facebook by making a secondary use of user information. Google leveraged information gathered in Gmail with Buzz, and set a default to sharing your email contacts to maximize uptake of the service. In the process, the privacy of Google users was overlooked and ultimately compromised.

We don’t imagine too many Twitter users will be ditching their Tweets to exclusively Buzz, but add better collaboration with Twitter and Facebook, and Google Buzz could get very interesting indeed. Watch this space.

That’s the opinion of Patience Wheatcroft, editor-in-chief, Europe, of ‘The Wall Street Journal Europe’, speaking in London this morning.

Whether Google vs. Rupert Murdoch will ultimately end in conflict or compromise remains to be seen. Should matters really have reached this point? As Iain Martin, deputy editor, Europe, ‘The Wall Street Journal Europe’, points out: “The newspaper industry just seemed to assume a solution would turn up [regarding free news content online]. It didn’t.”

All credit to the ‘Wall Street Journal’ for seeing both sides of the story in good old-fashioned journalistic style though. Wheatcroft may not be happy but Eric Schmidt, the chairman and chief executive officer of Google Inc., was allowed his say on the matter in ‘The Wall Street Journal’ this week.

In fact, what has been announced is an update to an existing programme called ‘First Click Free’, which has been around for at least a couple of years.  The change seems to be that now surfers can see up to five news items via Google before encountering the publisher’s pay wall. Originally it was just a single article, which presumably explains the relative lack of interest in this product – it can’t have laid many breadcrumbs to tempt potential subscribers to publishers’ websites.

This looks to be a simple change by Google, but one that may significantly impact the economics of online news. By tackling head-on the seemingly unstoppable force of free news Murdoch may have achieved something that all other news organisations have failed at. Was the Bing thing all a negotiating tactic? Possibly. I’d hate to play poker with the man.

As we’ve written before, the media has been having a terrible time of late, as the Internet has ravaged its content and made much of it available for free. Publishers’ profits have plunged, many jobs have been cut and boards have searched in vain for a business model that works in the Google era.

Now, Rupert Murdoch has had enough of what he sees as the theft of his content by search engines, and is pushing back in typically robust style. As predicted recently, he has moved to enforce ‘pay-walls’ around the websites of News Corp’s newspapers. This week, news broke that he’s looking at a deal that would ‘de-index’ News Corp’s websites from Google and instead award that privilege to Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, in return for a fee.

At this stage, there’s no consensus on whether this is a good idea or if it can be made to work. Evangelists for free online news, like Jeff Jarvis, say this is yet more evidence that Murdoch totally fails to ‘get it’ when it comes to the Internet and that trying to screen his content behind pay-walls is futile and self-defeating. In the opposing corner is the FT’s John Gapper who thinks that maybe Murdoch knows something we’ve all missed and that this “could be a pivotal moment in Internet economics”. Although Murdoch’s titles will experience a steep decline in traffic as a result of this move, he may still end up financially better off, as Gapper explains.

If this plan comes to fruition (and isn’t just a bargaining ploy with Google) it could be an approach adopted by other publishers desperate to stem their financial losses. There could be a future in journalism after all.

The other point of interest is what this means for the search engine market. When Bing was launched earlier this year we weren’t optimistic that it would threaten Google’s stranglehold on search (about 60% of the US market and a whopping 80% in the UK). However, Gapper discloses that Microsoft is talking to other content publishers about deals similar to Murdoch’s, which could give Bing an increasing amount of the content that people really want. As a result, we may yet see real competition emerge in the search market, which can only be a good thing for the rest of us.