I love Google. I really do. My quality of life would be so much more poor without them and their awesome Internet tools. I use Gmail and Reader and Docs and Picasa and News every day of my life, pretty much, not to mention, you know, internet searches. And I love Social Media! Sometimes we fight, but at the end of the day I’m actually quite fond of Twitter and Digg and other similar sites. I hate Facebook, sure, but I still appreciate the fact that it exists.

So in theory, I should be over the moon at the release of Google Buzz, the new Google-driven Social Media tool.

In practice… it’s not bad. It’s hard to tell how the service is going to shape up over time, but the immediate integration with almost all my other Google applications is really powerful. The interface is kind of ishy, particularly for comments, and at the end of the day it all pretty strongly resembles FriendFeed. The key at this point, I suspect, is hitting a critical mass of users. If anyone can do it, Google can.

Anyway, my pros and cons of Google Buzz after using it for a day:

CONS

1. Every time someone that I am following posts or comments, I get both a Google Buzz notification and a new email about it. This double notification will, over time, make me insane.
2. The comments interface is ugly. Google seems to want to emphasize interactivity with buzzes, but the comments are unthreaded and by design just seem to be piled haphazardly into a big white space.
3. Google is notorious for locking their tools away in a box where the rest of the internet can’t get to them, and I’m afraid I see that happening with Buzz. I think it’s great that you can connect other non-Google accounts such as Twitter right away, but the lack of RSS feeds makes me nervous. Without them, my Buzz is a lot less interesting and useful.
4. This is the big one: Google Profile Issues. On Facebook, I am “friends” with close friends, immediate family, remote family, ex-colleagues, my old high school class, and so on. The result of this huge social network is that I NEVER post anything to Facebook. What could I possibly put in my status that would appeal to such a diverse group? I get flustered just thinking about it.Buzz is tied to one’s email account. I use my email account for chatting with friends, sending resumes, catching up with family, and as a way to store information (train tickets, online purchase receipts, bills, etc). There are a lot of “personnas” embodied in one email address, and that works perfectly for email. Attach a social networking component, however, and these personnas get jumbled together. Should I aim my Google Profile and associated Buzz at potential employers, or my best friends? Ahhhh!

PROS

1. Buzz is integrated into Gmail. I love this so much, because I am on Gmail almost constantly. More importantly, almost everyone I know has a Gmail account so there’s a pretty huge pool of potential Buzz users, even right from the first minute it came online.
2. The mobile features are really neat, combining the status posting of Twitter with the location awareness of FourSquare, all in a delicious Google shell.
3. Buzz, as opposed to Twitter, is much better designed for sharing links. Way back in the day the first few generations of weblogs focused on sharing links to cool things found elsewhere on the Internet. That emphasis on content has fallen by the wayside a bit with Twitter and Tumblr and modern weblogs (mine included!). Buzz has some really nice link- and content-sharing features which brings that back into the forefront. No tiny URLs, lots of room to comment, and easy image sharing makes for the best social link-sharing platform that I’ve seen in a long time.

I’m still not sure what role Buzz will take in the long run for most people. If it were anyone but Google I would probably be predicting its slow demise, but rolling it out to millions of Gmail users could just be the hook it neesd to thrive in an increasingly packed Social Media scene.