I read your blog post religiously and I actually missed this one in my excitement over the Aardvark acquisition announcement yesterday.

Great minds think alike I suppose as I had expressed a very similar concern in my own blog post on Buzz yesterday, that Google could be losing site of its core principles.

As an Xoogler, I’m a big fan of the company, brand, and its products and still today am astonished that such a powerful global brand was built with no advertising. They religiously focused on the user and built their search product to support the needs of customers. In doing so they became a poster child for customer-centrism, a concept that many engineering run companies fail to understand. So often tech companies develop features and design products that are innovative, but fail to meet a customer need or provide a real benefit. That’s a recipe for failure, and it happens all the time.

I’ve built my career as a marketer around the customer experience, and Google increased my conviction by teaching me to focus on the user when developing products. Perhaps the Buzz team has a social blind spot and failed to recognize that people might not want to know the business of near strangers, or acquaintances with whom they happened to exchange an email with once long ago. Alternatively, maybe the user took a back seat to strategic corporate goals and Google’s desire to gain advantage in an industry with intense competitive rivalry.

My friends and I tried Buzz, and had a very similar experience to PC. In this case it seems that Google’s shareholders have prevailed over the user.

With 1/2 the connected US on the site Facebook is already the white pages for millions. As millions of businesses build out their presence, it becomes the yellow pages. Factor in location technology and you get something even bigger – an ad model.

Now think about Bing. They have maps and the best non-Google search technology. Their social search is particularly strong.

Combine this all and I see very big things afoot. Google has a major competitor. Are they up to the fight?

No doubt, this is a huge play for Google’s move into social. Buzz is the first step to building the user base, by automatically opting everyone on Gmail into Buzz. Now they’ll be able to roll out the Aardvark technology to this huge user base, arguably giving Google’s social offering more leverage in actually making a company money, even if this is as simple as serving AdWords ads against a user’s question.

Two big elements at play here. First (similar to traditional search), the user expresses an intent. Second, a response is offered by someone in the social circle, offering more semantic information for Google to leverage to serve a relevant ad.

Ideal scenario for Google is that conversion rates go through the roof. Unlike Gmail ads which, I have to guess, don’t convert particularly well, I would imagine these ads could convert at an even higher rate than web search.

And that could be a LOT of money.

Seems to me they have bene focussing on their users.

Thanks Google, for finally doing social right.

When I started using it, there were 2 big questions that really turned me off from the product.

1) Who are these random strangers that are in my feed? Oh, it’s the recruiter that I randomly emailed with years ago. Why can I read his conversation? I feel like I’ve violated someone’s privacy.

2) Where’s the Facebook and Twitter integration? Great. Now my newsfeed is scattered between 2 different sources. Gah.. not a great user experience.

I buzz-ed about this and set of this huge debate, particularly with my friend at Google who says it’s because they want to support open protocols. Fair enough.

But I still see it as a deliberate attempt at ignoring the elephant in the room which is more of a business decision than a philosophical one.

Lastly, I went back into buzz today and 5 of the 6 people following me are complete strangers. I find this irksome. Now that I’ve had 24 hours to digest it, I see that they created a Facebook like Newsfeed with a Twitter-like connection (Follow) model. It’s an interesting concept… but something that doesn’t belong in my Inbox. :\

With that said, I recognize any disruptive technology may have some initial aversion.. and if it’s a very large aversion, there’s something good about that. So we’ll see if that stands the test of time.

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Buzz is actually trying to connect you to things you’ll find relevant rather than let you do the heavy lifting. You pick your friends and then Google finds what you want. Obviously this may fail to work, but if it does work I think Twitter and Facebook won’t be able to duplicate this any more than they could duplicate Google search.

Of course you are right that Google needs to find simple ways to better integrate Buzz with Twitter and Facebook, especially for non-gmail users, but that should be not be difficult as everything moves to open source with robusts APIs for these tasks. Buzz is part of the convergence you’ve wanted for some time, so I’m not sure why you are resisting it. It adds functionality to the social experience as a social search tool, so it’s good stuff.