What’s the Buzz about Buzz?

You and around 146 million other users may have noticed this week that Google recently added a social networking service, “Buzz,” to its already large list of features.

Signing into Gmail on Wednesday, we noticed something was different. The regular spots to enter username and password were missing when you directed your mouse to where you should have been able to log in. What the heck?! Google fail? Impossible. Recognizing that Google must be up to something, you must have reluctantly directed your gaze towards the screen and seen this golden message: “Go beyond status messages.”

But what exactly does that mean? And why is Buzz any different from Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and LinkedIn? And doesn’t the name Buzz evoke images of annoying mosquitoes? These were the initial questions that ran through our heads as we got used to Buzz in Gmail’s interface.

To get these questions answered, we turned to the official Google Blog. “Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting," it read. "It's built right into Gmail, so you don't have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch—it just works."

The first thing we did was check how many friends (or “followers,” in Buzz lingo) we had. 29! Not bad. Then we noticed that one of them was a TF from Moral Reasoning last semester and another was Grandma's scrabble partner. Awkward. We were almost ready to take a break from Buzz when we got our first notification. It was a cousin buzzing about his intense CrossFit training and the number of “burpees” he did yesterday. TMI, we thought.

At lunch, the tables were buzzing with conversations about Buzz. Most people seemed less than enthusiastic, citing too many other social networking sites and an overload of tweets and status updates already. Others thought that it wasn’t worth it to switch over to Buzz from Facebook. Still, there were some optimistic souls. We’ll see what comes of the noise.