Having activated and quickly turned off again GMail's new feature I was left wondering why a great email reader was being polluted by some shitty Twitter crap. I like my communication formal and simply don't have the need to tell the world in a scattergun approach what I am currently doing. Buzz in itself is also not very Googley so I was scratching my head what it was all about. Then I read column in the New York Times:
Facebook and Twitter will face renewed pressure to publish and consume standardized data feeds as well now. If Buzz is big enough, it could break the dam holding back a flood of standardized data. Where there is standized (sic) data, there is scalable network effects, consumer choice, competition and thus innovation.
Maybe Google isn't really interested in providing another me-too product. Maybe they want to pry open Facebook and their social data feeds so they can organise and rank them, making them useful for their users. Think of a Google Reader for Twitter/Facebook/Friendfeed. Then do what Google does best and slap a few ads in it and bingo! As always Google isn't really a content provider but rather a way to channel all the available content out there and make it into a neat, bite-size parcel. That's what made them what they are today.