Today Google announced its newest product: Google Buzz. It's a social networking feature directly integrated into Google Mail and lets you post status updates, images and videos - simply all social content you'd probably like to share with others. A brief introduction into its features can be seen in the following video. I'd like to share some thoughts on the impact Buzz might have on the adoption of social media. 

Lots of my friends and family keep asking me about this Twitter or Facebook thing they've been hearing about. Seldomly they understand my take to explain it. Most of them just don't see a value in using it in their daily life. In my opinion that's mainly because they don't have the patience to use it until reaching a critical mass of active friends or followers, who actually are key to experiencing value.

Jeremia Owyang is right in stating that email and social networks have quite a lot in common. Email is the first and largest online social network. Even today many people write emails to share their fotos, links and thoughts. Recently some of them started using social network (Facebook, StudiVZ, Xing) messages or chat clients instead. However most of the people you've ever had online contact with will probably have a place in your email contacts.

With Buzz Google starts using its information about these relationships for automated friendship recommendations. But what about my non-GMail contacts? How will I be able to share my content with them? If there's only one important contact of mine not using GMail and thus not being able to see my updates, I'll probably opt for using a simple mail instead of writing a Buzz.

It'll also be interesting to see how they achieve a separation of those people I contact often (e.g. professional contacts) but don't want to share my private fotos with. Facebook is already raising critical voices on Google Buzz' friendship model. By the way: Twitter lacks an easy method for noise reduction, too. In Facebook you can send updates to defined lists of your friends (see What Twitter could learn from Facebook when it comes to privacy and noise reduction).

Of course there are many more things that Google Buzz is probably going to change. Just to name a few of them:

• encourage competitive innovation among existing social networks (especially Twitter, Facebook),
• higher impact of influential opinion leaders on traditional search (Google just started to prominently include Twitter updates in their live search results some time ago)
• and finally Google is getting social! That's a crucial part of the internet they've not been part of so far.  

I'm really looking forward to see if Google Buzz is able to trigger another wave of social networking especially among people who did not see a value in it so far. What is your opinion on Google Buzz? Share your thoughts in the comments.