buzz.com Beta – Our Newest Local Search Experience

I’m Charlie Hornberger, and I’m heading up the buzz.com project for AT&T Interactive. We’re opening our public beta of buzz.com by letting users outside of AT&T Interactive use buzz.com for the first time.

What is buzz.com?
buzz.com is the newest local search experience developed by AT&T Interactive that helps users tap their existing social networks (starting with Facebook) for local recommendations. Talking about the best places to go or best businesses to work with is a conversation that is already happening online. Think of buzz.com as social bookmarking for your local world.

Check out this video for a taste of the user experience:

Our internal group of alpha testers gave us a lot of valuable feedback, and although we are still in the process of addressing feedback by tweaking the user interface and adding features, we think it is time for input from a much wider base of users. That’s why we’re opening the site – by invitation only – to external users now. We’re hoping the feedback will reinforce the functions before we begin promoting buzz.com more widely.

How do I get an invite?
If you’re interested in joining, sign up on buzz.com to receive an invite as we expand access. We hope to share some invites with our Beta Labs readers, too, so stay tuned.

As we get more feedback from users and continue to build out the experience, we’ll keep you posted here on our latest updates or follow us on Twitter and Facebook .