This week everyone has been talking about Google Buzz, the latest thing to roll out of the search giants labs. After waiting 2 days I finally got to see it and was pretty underwhelmed by what they are offering.

The first impression is that it is a half-assed Facebook/Friendfeed ripoff. If this service came out 2 years ago maybe I would have given it the time of day, but to me this seems a day late and a buck short on the part of Google. Google has failed at getting any slice of the social networking pie over the years, losing out badly to Facebook and Twitter. They tried launching a social network, called Orkut back in 2004, but did little to nothing with it. In 2007 they bought Twitter clone Jaiku, then did little to nothing with it.

The biggest issue with this product is that it requires building out yet another network of friends. I know myself I’m tired of it. I’ve used eMode/Tickle, Hi5, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and LinkedIn over the last 7 years and I’m all networked out. That doesn’t even mention the niche networks like Digg, MyBlogLog, thesixtyone and Last.fm that I have used, or the services I signed up to and never built out a full network on. Google is absolutely crazy to expect people like myself to use their service, and the reality is, if they don’t have a geek community evangelizing their product to others it will go nowhere.

The part that baffles me about this product is who they’re targeting with this product?  It doesn’t do micro blogging as well as Twitter.  It doesn’t do content sharing as well as FriendFeed or Facebook.  Are they targeting Gmail users too stupid to know any better?  Buzz features pretty much zero innovation and looks like one of Google’s many also ran products in the marketplace.  Google seems obsessed with having their thumb in every pie.  Aside from search where they are undisputed kings, Google seems to be getting a reputation of making me too products that don’t manage to innovate or if they do innovate, are so far behind the market leader that closing the gap is nearly impossible.

Google, I think I’ll pass.