I just finished watching the press conference debuting to the public the new social network “Google Buzz.” Aside from a confusing name (there are already a handful of products from all the major companies, including Google itself, entitled Buzz), it looks like a stellar product and something to actually get excited about.

Perhaps it’s a result of the fact that a new entrant to the social networking race has actually entered a horse, or the fact that the social network hot wars have cooled down from 2006, when Google, Microsoft and Yahoo were unveiling a new social network every ten minutes, but I’m actually interested in this. I tend to think my excitement comes from a much less cynical reason: it seems like a social network actually done right.

What do I mean by that? Open and useful.

This thing looks like Friendfeed, for those of you who used that service, but done right. For the rest of you, it looks like the public timeline that Facebook has been striving for all these years, but has as of yet been unable to achieve.

Not only does it seem to integrate the best features of Friendfeed (particularly how conversations work), it seems to really take the best features of Friendfeed (particularly automatic detection of various media types shared from links and status updates).

What is it exactly?  Google’s provided one of their handy-dandy videos explaining it all, but for the Google-savvy, it can best be described as a marriage between Google Profiles, GMail, their media products (YouTube, Picasa, et al…), Maps, Latitude, and wrapped in a Friendfeed-esque interface.

Google Buzz’s Five Points

Their press conference focused on five aspects of the new social network, which bear repeating before I delve into what I think might be this social network’s weaknesses.

Autofollowing

I imagine there is some mechanism either in place now (or will be implemented soon via Google Profiles) for manual following, but Google Buzz will automatically handle the following and unfollowing of friends in your network, based upon who you interact with via eMail, Google Reader or other Google products.

This will take a great deal of the pain of contact management out of dealing with the social network, but will introduce new issues (more on that here).

“Rich Fast Sharing”

This refers to the ability to quickly insert content of various types. Out of the box, it seems to support a wide variety of popular image and video sharing tools, as well as having the ability to take any URL, automatically pull media links out of it, and share them as thumbnails with the activity stream item.  Even more important, it breaks new ground amongst social networks by having a better way to view images and media.

If you’re using Facebook, you’re often stuck with the only option being viewing the originating page for the media or going to Facebook’s photo management pages. Within the new Google interface, you’re able to intuitively click through a lightbox interface, requiring no pageview refreshes, and no major deviation from the inline UI.

Public and Private Sharing

This is an issue already tackled by networks like Multiply and Facebook, and while the approach may not be as elegant as what’s available on Multiply, it definitely beats out the ease of use seen on Facebook. Third-tier social networks may have their butts handed to them with this feature alone, since many have used privacy and filtering as their selling point against larger networks MySpace and Facebook for years.

Inbox Integration

They passed off this point as a minor one towards the end of the first half of the presentation, but it’s really the crux of the whole network. Almost all social networks (with the possible exception of Twitter) have strong ties to email. Facebook is re-launching this week as an email provider. MySpace has seen great success re-engaging users by providing email service. Buzz will have it at launch, since it’s essentially built off the existing GMail interface. Tying in sharing of items to mail is almost trivial, given that.

Automatic Filtration

Google also has created a “secret sauce” algorithm for determining what’s “important to see” in your activity streams. This is something I immediatly recognized as potentially problematic. Facebook, since it’s inception, has always created great negative waves amongst their user base by trying to evolve it’s determination as to what should show up when a user logs into the service.

They talked about filtering out things like “picking my nose” and “feeding my cat.” Often, these link-less status updates are the ones that regular people that aren’t into constantly producing and consuming Internet content are looking for, but Google may automatically determine these to be completely irrelevant.

They also talked about evolving the algorithm on a case by case basis for users, based upon what gets liked or unliked.  Guessing at what my intent is when I like or hide an item can also be problematic. Did I do it because I don’t care for that person? Did I do it because I found the content disagreeable?  Which reason is Google assuming?  Without a well thought out approach to this, I could end up missing a lot of content I don’t want to miss (here’s hoping Google put great thought into this).

There’s a Gaping Hole, Though

Google talked a little bit about filtration, and of course Steve Gillmor had to ask Google about the “Track” feature, but no one raised a question about the true elephant in the room regarding Google’s social problem: contact management.

I had pretty much given up, after being the last holdout who hoped for a social experience I’d enjoy at Google, when it looked like even a mass appeal by the most ardent Google Reader users to Google to fix their contact database wouldn’t garner so much as a response:

Back in 2006-2007, when Facebook was performing their final ascent, Twitter was a twinkle in everyone’s eye and no one was yet talking about the gPhone, there was a company named Google. Google was king of the heap in all things. Google Reader was my primary jumping off point for the web, GMail ran my social graph and was my primary communications tool, and I was proud of my early access to Google Voice.

In Google Reader, one of the least social of all my social media tools, I have a friend named Richard Schwarting, a computer scientist and avid post-sharer. Last night he shared with me the culmination of his frustration with Google and their social initiative in the form of a Get Satisfaction thread:

“Yay for Google Contacts! Now tell us whether to "just wait" on greader issues, or what:getsatisfaction.com/google_contacts doesn’t exist, even though google.com/contacts does. I realize the service is in BETA, but google reader users with issues about relationship mgmt vis-a-vis google contacts are left reading tea leaves.”

There were around 11 people who ‘had the same problem,’ including one who said: “The same is here. It’s very frustrating. I actually nearly gave up on GReader contacts.”

It’s a small and esoteric group of people, we Google Reader fanatics. I get that. It’s indicative of a much larger problem at Google, though. There were a half a dozen points along the way where Google could have certainly quashed the uprising of startups like Twitter and Facebook and never did. They didn’t see the future in them. Only when the social media revolution was well under way did they realize that they held the keys to everyone’s social graph data, and got ‘serious’ about getting something done.

Except nearly nothing ever did get done.

There’s more at the original post, but from what I can tell, the same quirky issues that cause the Google Reader frustrations is the engine that drives the autofollowing within Google’s Buzz.  The irritation we all feel about Google Reader is just about to get exposed to the millions of GMail users that are about to be turned on to this new social network. 

I give it about a week before the backlash starts rearing it’s ugly head.

Despite That, I Still Highly Reccomend Buzz

Buzz is launching with a very powerful set of APIs, the kind that Twitter and Facebook wish they had. I’ve only done a cursory walkthrough on the APIs available on Buzz, but I’m already impressed.

Here’s just a few things I’ve figured out I’m able to do out of the box:

– Automatically import Facebook status updates.
– Automatically export status updates from Buzz to Facebook
– Automatically import and/or export to Twitter as well.
– Do all that fun lifestreaming stuff you did in Friendfeed (meaning import Last.FM, Xbox status, all that jazz).

This allows us to have a platform we’re sure isn’t going to go anywhere to be the engine for our lifestream, as well as automatically store and export the data to any personally owned database we choose.

John’s written his thoughts down here about the impact he expects this to have on developers. As someone who writes code himself, I’m particularly excited.