I haven’t been able to play with it yet as it is not on my phone or on my gmail yet (though one of the iPhone guys in the office has been able to get it!), it is looking like Google’s got everything it needs to get hip deep in to the location based sharing and status game. The web based application for gmail looks like “wave for everyone”, while the phone app looks like a combination of foursquare (without the points) and Twitter without the character limit and Facebook without the constantly changing (not evolving) interfaces. I don’t know if it will take off, but in light of Project Titan (Facebook’s email project), Google will need to come up with something to keep eyeballs on their gmail inbox and to do it in such a manner that it becomes seamless.
Looking at the promo videos right now it feels like they took the ideas for Buzz from the Sense and MotoBlur adaptations of Android and rolled them together – those of the OS collecting and being able to update/manage all updates and data streams from a unified application. If this works, they will have caught the “power social media user” demographic, the ones that have multiple networks and are obviously multiply connected. This also gets the people who are into only one Social Media system. It doesn’t do anything for those who are now using one system exclusively (those Facebook shut ins and Twitnuts out there), but I don’t think that was ever Google’s intention.
Finally, looking at what else Google is saying, this rolls out to regular gmail first and then to hosted accounts. This could be the real kicker – all of the sudden, institutions/companies get a social system to share media “for free” and Google gets a host of users using it’s share paradigm in return… it should be interesting to see how this plays out.
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