In short Google Buzz is Google's attempt to move into the social media scene. I'm somewhat confused by my own statement as a few year's ago now I remember having an account with a site called Orkut that I never used and only signed up to because Google had just bought them. Orkut on the face of it is a social networking site, but I didn't really hang around to find out anymore than that.
So back to Buzz. A lot of people have made a lot of noise about Buzz and a lot of the noise has tended to be negative. That seems to be the trend with new technology. Dismiss it out of hand because it is different. To me, it's precisely because it's different that I often find myself enthusiastic.
My first 'buzz' strangely seems to capture my initial thoughts (it wasn't supposed to!):
I stand by my thoughts that it won't be a flash in the pan because Sergey Brin publicised it (although not necessarily for those reasons) and also my thinking that it will never be able to compete with Facebook because it wasn't around when Soical Media needed defining. Facebook was and as such became the standard bearer (in the same way as Hotmail did for web-based email).
However I think Google Buzz will settle down into a popular and effective Social Media tool in time. As my brother commented (a reply via email rather than a 'buzz', which I found strange):
It appears Google has gone for a Social Media aggregator rather than a separate networking or community environment. The feature that stands out most for me is the ability to add 'connected sites' to your Buzz feed.
The premise seems to be that you connect all of your web based sites where information is dynamic and of interest to other people (the list also includes Blogger, YouTube, Google Chat although crucially not Facebook), and when you change your status on these sites, they are updated through Buzz. The idea being you no longer need to check countless sites to see the latest information, although presumably you need to log into countless sites to update your own status!
If Facebook were added in time this would be a distinct advantage. I can't see Buzz drawing huge amounts of new users to Gmail but I can see it being beneficial to existing Gmail users. My concern would be that this was not the intended outcome Google had in mind when they created Buzz.
I will probably post again once I've had the chance to use Buzz a bit more, see if my experiences change my initial thoughts.
~~ update ~~
This piece has a bit more perspective around the security aspect, something I haven't got round to looking into but would appear important!
http://charman-anderson.com/2010/02/11/google-buzz-not-fit-for-purpose/
