Some thoughts on Google Buzz

As nearly everyone knows, Google released Buzz - a FriendFeed-like social lifestream platform that allows people to pull in updates from various sites like Twitter, Reader and Flickr, add status updates and consolidate them into a single feed accessible via your Google Profile and Gmail. Add in Gmail's natural social graph powered by your contacts list and we have a pretty compelling social offering.

However, with this offering comes another degree of confusion. Which of my feeds should my friends consume? I have a twitter feed which my twitter followers can consume. It posts updates to Facebook for Facebook users to read and comment on. People who follow me on Twitter and are friends with me on Facebook get these updates twice. Not a great setup but understandable. Now throw Buzz into the mix and suddenly Twitter posts show up in 3 locations! I can see that getting annoying quickly. To make matters worse, each platform has "some" content that won't show up in the others.

To combat this, I think Google needs to step up and make Buzz "the" aggregator for all of a person's social content. To do this effectively, it will need to eliminate duplicates caused by cross posting services and somehow incorporate site-specifc comments as well. (Sounds *a lot" like FriendFeed, doesn't it.) Aggregating site comments is extremely complicated, especially when we add blog commenting services like Disqus into the mix but if Google solves this problem, it will have positioned itself to be a dominant player in the social space.