Google Buzz has arrived, but will it win Google’s place in the social web?

Not yet.

In fact, all the buzz about Google Buzz has been decidedly negative, and a large deal of it boils down to Buzz’s integration with GMail.  I’m inclined to agree.

After a few days of using Buzz, I’m already “blanking” the little number in GMail that tells me how many Buzz alerts I have to read.  You could argue that email is the most social application out there, so integrating Buzz with Gmail should be a good move.  And yet, it doesn’t quite work.

So what’s gone wrong? Here’s the word on the street from a few critics:

Too Much Noise

VC Fred Wilson:

[The number shown in my Buzz feed] is one of my big issues with Buzz. That (42) number includes replies to buzzes (can I call them tweets?) that the people I am following leave. Buzz copies the FriendFeed user experience for the most part. And as much as I admire FriendFeed and the people who built it, I don’t believe that is a compelling experience for the mainstream user.

When I follow Pete Cashmore in Buzz, I’m basically following all of his fans. And my Buzz timeline is filled with all of their replies to his posts. I think that user experience works well in something like this blog and the comments. I don’t think it works well in a mass medium where I want to follow hundreds of people.

Poor Links with Facebook and Twitter

Chris O’Brien of SiliconBeat:

On Google Buzz, I can pull in tweets, but can’t publish them out. And there’s no ability to link my Facebook account. Those are both big flaws in my view. If I’m going to build a new social network on someone else’s platform, I want it to work well with the others I’ve already created.

As it stands now, I can’t integrate these networks as much as I’d like. So I have to choose between them. And of course Google Buzz will stay way back in the back.

Facebook Is Still Better

Mashable argues that Facebook still trumps Google Buzz because Buzz doesn’t incentivise people to leave their existing social networks:

I predicted at the end of last year that Facebook is well-poised to try to pry web dominance away from Google in 2010. Buzz doesn’t change my mind. Facebook is threatening Google, but Google isn’t threatening Facebook because it doesn’t offer any features so great that they incentivize people to leave behind their existing networks or spend their time updating and following yet another one when their friends are already all on Facebook or Twitter.

Facebook now dominates the social web so completely that it’s difficult to imagine an exodus to a competing service, unless that service offered some revolutionary new features that Facebook couldn’t possibly match — Buzz doesn’t.

Reading updates feels like an obligation

Here’s an interesting point from Alan Hogan, who’s post is currently one of the top bookmarks in delicious’ popular bookmarks.  He argues that putting Buzz in Google Mail doesn’t make sense because the two are different tools with different priorities:

Since Buzz is a direct competitor to Twitter, Buzz updates are theoretically low-value, non-critical, skimmable, and okay to completely ignore. Adding an unread count encourages users to catch up on Buzz items as soon as one or more new ones are available. All of the above “features” interrupt workflow, fragment skimming sessions, and ruin the low-intensity “skim, read, and briefly respond” experience.

No one is arguing that Google is doing the right thing by going hard at the social Web.  Hard as they may try, they’ve still got a ways to go.  I’ll know it works when the rest of my network abandons everything else for Buzz.  Until then, it’s back to Twitter and Facebook for me.

Are you playing with Google Buzz?  Please share your thoughts in the comments.