What’s all the buzz about Google Buzz?

Google announced yesterday its newest public project, Google Buzz.  Google Buzz lets you, “Go beyond status messages,” allowing you to, “share updates, photos, videos, and more.”  It enables you to “start conversations about the things you find interesting.”  Google has placed Buzz as a link inside of Gmail.  To say it best, Buzz is like the lovechild of Twitter, Facebook, and Google Wave.  From the Twitter perspective, Buzz allows you to post status messages, or microblog your life. From the Facebook angle, it allows you to post content, like photos and videos, and share it with your friends. The Google Wave functionality ties in because all the status updates are real-time with no need to refresh the page.

My thoughts on Buzz are that Google is trying to simplify people’s workflow by giving them more of what they already use elsewhere, inside of a single location – Gmail.  They’re really testing to see how many people use Gmail as their primary communication tool, and how many are willing to make it even a larger part of their communication schema.  For me personally, similarly to Twitter, I use Gmail as a service, not a website.  I very rarely, perhaps once or twice a week, go to Gmail.com.  I get all my messages via IMAP sent to Apple’s Mail application on both my iPhone and on my Mac.  So for users like me, there’s no real benefit to using Buzz because I not only never visit Gmail.com, but I also don’t use Google contacts for any other reason besides Google Voice.  However, for anyone completely engulfed in the Google experience, that is, users who use Google Docs, Chat, Wave, Gmail, Voice, etc., then Buzz is just one more service added to your current toolset to simplify your life.

If you’re interested in giving Buzz a try or learning more, check out http://www.google.com/buzz