Google, too, seems not to need a weather vane to tell it what’s up with its last major new product. Which is why, in my opinion, the search giant introduced Google Buzz yesterday: a Gmail-integrated product which, at least superficially, resembles Wave. Buzz is like Wave, but better, since people are already actually using it.

Top among my laundry list of complaints regarding Google Wave was how it seemed like a walled garden, cut off from other elements of the social web, most notably Gmail itself. Sure, there were a variety of bots and hacks to get those things into Wave, but why make things needlessly complicated, especially with regards to Google’s existing tools? It just seemed designed to sour entry-level and casual users against it.

Google seems to have taken note of that bitterness, and made Buzz with exactly the opposite in mind. It plugs into your existing social networks quickly and easily, but I can already see that people will end up using it instead of, rather than in concert with, sites like Twitter. Avid FriendFeed users like Robert Scoble have quickly thrown their considerable support behind Buzz, possibly because the Google product is fairly reminiscent of that Facebook-acquired networking site.

At a fundamental level, Google Buzz is already much more functional than Wave, if only because it talks to things outside of itself easily and with a minimum of hassle. Plus it lives in your Gmail, which is where a lot of online workers spend much of their day anyway. And unlike Twitter, it supports threaded conversations, and a variety of different methods of interaction and sharing. It’s like Facebook without the annoying apps, or like Twitter with all the good bits of Facebook thrown in.

From a web working perspective, I can already see how it would be better for interviewing, for surveying public opinion, and for conducting meaningful research. As long as people get behind it, it will succeed, and since they already show good signs of doing so, I think this is one horse you can safely bet on.

Do you think Buzz is better than Wave? Do you ever see yourself using it more than Twitter or Facebook in the future?

I have jumped around a lot over the years in the sites I check. But recently, the one I go to first is FareCompare.com. It has many similarities but also some key differences, vs. other multi-airline travel sites whose names are more familiar, including Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity.
FareCompare makes forecasts on the direction air fares are headed, so that anyone who can plan weeks or months in advance can have a better idea about the best time to buy tickets. The site also has a greater variety of information and recent news about air travel than others I’ve checked.

Another good site, farecast, also predicts whether fares are likely to rise or fall on multiple U.S. airline routes. In planning a trip to Europe next summer, I am using both farecompare and farecast and am finding prices within a few dollars of each other on the two sites.
On both farecompare and farecast and some other similar sites, including Kayak, Sidestep and Vayama, you don’t book travel services directly.
To actually buy a ticket, you’re sent to the airlines’ own sites or to ones like Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity that are online travel agencies authorized by airlines to issue their tickets.

FareCompare CEO Rick Seaney says he has developed predictive capabilities, using a massive database of airfares past, present and future, that others haven’t matched yet. For 2009, Seaney’s big-picture forecast: Expect domestic air fares to be higher than they were this year, and international fares to be a bit lower, or at least to not go up as much as domestic prices.

Another reason I tilt toward FareCompare is its direct link to Southwest Airlines’ web site. Southwest is not part of the traditional airline and travel agents’ “global distribution system,” and thus doesn’t have its flights listed in the other big multi-airline sites.

Anyone who has Southwest service available within 100 miles of home should be checking its simple, easy-to-use site along with the multi-airline sites. Southwest flies only domestically and doesn’t cover the whole country, but it serves almost all major metro areas and dozens of mid-sized cities. According to hitwise.com, Southwest.com consistently gets more traffic than any of the multi-airline sites.

How do you plan trips and make reservations on the web?

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