Column: With new service, Google generates a 'Buzz'

Google has just released a service poised to challenge Facebook and Twitter’s supremacy over social media. It opens in Gmail, integrates directly with your contacts and launches you into a Google-sponsored world of social media feeds, followers and comments. It’s a fusion of the Twitterverse and Facebook’s newsfeed. And yet, in some fundamental ways, it’s totally new and different.

They’re calling it Google Buzz. And in certain circles, it’s already huge. Within 48 hours of its launch, Buzz generated over 9 million posts and comments — that’s more than 180,000 an hour.

Even before Buzz’s debut, the hype engines of social media blogs catapulted it into the hearts and minds of an infatuated army of tech geeks. "Buzz" is the new buzz word among the tech literati.

But take the hype with a bucketful of salt. Google’s forays into personal communication have often underwhelmed (read: Google Wave and the Nexus One) despite comparable media fervor. Buzz may very well surprise naysayers — and Google is known for capitalizing on lackluster projects later on down the line — but my sense is that it’s probably too little too late.

Undoubtedly, there are features on Buzz that users will enjoy. Drawing on Facebook’s model of status updates and Twitter’s "followers," Buzz is familiar territory. Its interface complements Gmail’s minimalist design while integrating photos, videos and news through web applications like Picasa and Google Reader.

However, Buzz has some serious flaws — foremost among which is its disregard for privacy. Besides flouting its users’ privacy at launch by posting Gmail users’ top contacts before (quickly) responding with changes, Buzz makes potential data security breaches more costly. Integrating social media with e-mail consolidates a great deal of personally identifying information in one place. (If you use Gmail and you’re curious to see just how startlingly clear a picture can be formed about you and your web browsing habits, check out Google Dashboard.)

The Twitter follow-and-be-followed model adopted by Buzz has also met with its own share of problems. Followers on Buzz are imported directly from users' Gmail contacts. On the surface, it’s Google’s greatest moment of brilliance: In one fell swoop, it mapped the existing networks of 38 million users onto its fledgling social platform. But frequent e-mail contacts are not necessarily synonymous with friends. I had to go through the tedious process of unsubscribing several contacts with whom I did not want to share personal information.

While many sensibly assume that a combined e-mail and social media platform is a step forward in efficiency, I would argue that this sort of consolidation seriously limits functionality. Think about Facebook’s photos web application, which allows pictures to be tagged and linked to users’ profiles. Those profiles contain a plethora of information — links to friends, conversations — and Google Buzz simply can’t compete.

To access even these limited features, Buzz users must create a Gmail account. I know many people who are perfectly happy with their current e-mail clients and would be loath to switch when Facebook and Twitter already satisfy their social networking needs.

Google's fundamental platform is admirable. Buzz champions open, standardized user data and — unlike other services that have created propriety networks — it is structured to allow cross-platform messaging. This means that, in the future, users may be able to message friends who aren't on Buzz. There’s huge potential for interoperability.

For now, however, Buzz’s fatal flaws outweigh its potential benefits. The cost of switching to a new social network is likely to be too high for the millions already satisfied by Facebook, Twitter and the like. With Buzz, Google has overstretched its bounds.