Early last week Google began to roll out their new social sharing service “Buzz” to all of their Gmail users. Buzz is a “lifestream” (a lot like your News Feed in Facebook) where everything you are doing is combined with everything those you are “following” are doing, allowing for real-time sharing of Web content, images, status updates, and so forth. It’s pretty nifty in and of itself, considering that Google had also recently created social profiles of all their Gmail users and placed them in Google search results – basically, everything that’s already publicly available about a person through search brought in to one simple profile page (which users can control for privacy, of course). With the profile roll out and Buzz, users can now easily find and follow other people and see what they’re tweeting, what pics they are posting to Flickr, what music they are listening to on Pandora, and on and on. Almost overnight, Google became one of the largest social networks in the world by turning their search engine in to a makeshift social network.
The only problem is, Google Buzz, the flagship and most critical functional element of this new Google social network, is a horrible mess!
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