(crossposted from a discussion thread at EMC)
My first thoughts on Buzz are that it fails at solving a problem I don’t really even have.
It connects me to people I send GMail to, which is great. My GMail network is a subset of both my personal and professional networks, basically people I trust enough to give my personal address to. So it’s a great selection of people for me to start connecting with.  Success.
Then it lets them talk to me/eachother/the world in the same way facebook/twitter does. And frankly if those individuals want to do that, they are doing it already with facebook/twitter. Failure.
Then it lets them aggregate stuff they post in other areas, which is cool. I can see what my GMail network is reading in their Reader accounts (except if I wanted to, I could already follow them in Reader, as I do with many of my friends) and what they are posting to their Flickr and Picasa albums (cool). But…
Then it gets worse. People can bring in their twitter updates. So for the subset of my Gmail Network who are twitter-enabled, I see their stuff twice, once in my twitter client of choice, and once in Buzz. And as people comment on those twitter updates, they do so in a fragmented way, some in Twitter and some in Buzz. So if I want to see the whole conversation I have to monitor my friends twice and spend twice as much time dealing with their twitter updates. Failure.
So for twitter, it’s made my life harder, not easier, and I can’t afford that. It’s why I stopped using FriendFeed.
That’s just my first impression after a few hours with it. Maybe I’ll see more as it grows.
