What’s the Buzz about Google Buzz?

Is there a new sheriff in town, social media-wise? Yesterday Google released it’s newest product during a press conference. It’s called “Buzz”. It’s available only to those with a gmail account and links directly TO that gmail account. They also released Buzz for mobile devices, although I haven’t tested it yet.

Google Buzz offers you the option to connect publicly all the social accounts it can find for you. So you just type in the username for that account it found and it links you. It also finds all your friends from other accounts who are on Buzz and asks you if you’d like to follow them.

Once this is done, you see the live feed from all your friends and all their social networking accounts which are connected via THEIR Buzz, as well as all your own recent posts on your connected social networks. From the center of your gmail homepage, you can now post text, pictures and links which will go to all your connected friends and end up in THEIR live feeds in THEIR gmail accounts. So you can see, the potential is certainly there for this to become the Walmart of social network activity.

It’s been less than 24 hours since the launch of Buzz, and there are lots of questions and ideas and blogposts and buzz…about Buzz. And it’s not perfect…yet. But to have one place to handle email, chat and all social networking could prove to be the singular most awesome thing ever. We’ll just have to watch and see what happens as bugs get worked out and public suggestions get implemented etc. So far it seems pretty awesome. So far my only suggestions are 1. a feature which enables you to link the social networks which Google doesn’t automatically find for you. And 2. the ability to change your screenname.

Check it out for yourself, and see what YOU think. Here’s the link.