Well, its been a while, but with all the hype over Google’s new “Buzz” release, I thought I may as well stick my oar in.

It seems that Buzz is Google’s attempt to try to make up some ground on the Facebook juggernaut and the huge uptake on Twitter in the last year or so. It basically allows you to share status updates or content with people you are following or are following you, and displays them on you Google profile page (sounds familiar right ). No real innovation here yet, but it does tie in the mobile and location based stuff that the likes of Foursquare has made popular. Let’s just say it has potential.

The main thing here is that Google have tied it into Gmail, the almost defacto webmail service ( and some may say the last really ground breaking release by Google). Lets face it, everyone has a Gmail account, and if a new little counter starts to clock up inside your mail client you’re going to have a look. Followers can be added manually, or automatically based on your most frequently mailed contacts. I’m not too sure how this will work in practice. Personally, I’d like to be able to import selected contacts from other sources (Facebook, Twitter etc.), but seeing that the guys doing the Buzz Press conference wouldn’t even say the F-Word (As in Facebook) when asked about it directly, I won’t be holding my breath.

A couple of the main downfalls I can see first up are:

1. Everything is public by default. This can be changed quite easily, but shouldn’t be the default.
2. If you do want to direct things to a specific group of people, you have to have your contacts all grouped properly. Organised people will be fine, but when you import YEARS of phone contacts into Google Contacts, and rely or inline suggestions for everything, sorting can be a pain.
3. The actual public profile page where everything is flushed out, is actually pretty hard to find from the Gmail interface.

That’s all on Buzz for now. Integration with other services will be key here, and seeing that the social web’s big three are Facebook, Google and Twitter, if Buzz is to succeed, it’ll need to play nice with the other two at some point.