Note: Google’s policy team is a client of Engage. Thus, my goal is that you’ll be doubly floored by the impartiality of this product review.

Probably THE tech story of the week is the emergence of Buzz, Google’s foray into the world of short status updates currently the province of Twitter, Facebook, and in a lesser but still important sense, Foursquare.

My bottom line: Though I won’t be lessening my use of Twitter anytime soon and think @Jason’s wild praise is a factor of the tech-set’s fixation with the Friendfeed model, I do think Buzz will help late adopters dip their toes into the world of social media and open up new fronts in the still-lacking location-based social networking space.

The Plusses: Gmail Integration, Location

It’s hard to ignore the massive headstart Google has given itself by integrating Buzz into Gmail. Google is not generally big on product placement. Its spartan homepage rarely cross-promotes products. There’s no single place you can go to browse the wide array of Google products and services. As such, Google cannot guarantee a product’s success by scale alone. Products like Google Knol and sadly, Google Wave, can fail by seeming as far-flung from the rest of your Google experience as any upstart social network.

That is not the case with Buzz. This is a rare instance of Google building a product inside a tool tens of millions of people use daily, Gmail. The Buzz link is ubiquitous underneath one of the most clicked links in the world, the Gmail Inbox count. And its colorful branding and sense of escape from the daily grind of regular email — what Twitter is in the broader Internet sense — should be enough to ensure a modicum of success and scale. And beyond this simply being smart product placement, tight integration with my real world rolodex also makes the product more useful.

However, where I think Buzz’s greatest impact could be is in the world of location-based networking. You have to login on your phone to see it,  but the “Nearby” tab of Buzz on your phone clearly fills a void in the still nascent location space.

The current tools we have for tagging our posts by location are either too spartan or beside the point of their host services. Google Latitude allows us to tag where we are, and that’s it. No comments, photos, or much of anything really. Foursquare is a step up — dealing with the awkwardness of Minority Report-style GPS tracking by encouraging checkins at public locales like restaurants and bars, but again, not offering a real outlet for people to offer comment on the world around them. In fact, it’s so tied to these establishments despite recent efforts to enable checkins “anywhere” that it almost feels like a conspiracy by bar owners to drum up business in a down economy. Finally, there’s geolocation in Twitter, whose scale and wide install base on mobile devices should give it a powerful headstart in geolocation. Unfortunately, geolocated Twitter posts are still few and far between. We can speculate on the reasons, but since the vast majority of posts likely come from home and at the office, users surmise that this datum would either be 1) uninteresting, or 2) an invasion of privacy. More importantly though, Twitter is really about your thoughts. Where you are when you have them is almost secondary.

Instead of relying on third party clients, which can bury the GPS functionality, Google’s mobile Buzz app makes GPS location more obvious, as thought you’re expected to use it when you’re mobile. It also introduces the concept from day one, building a set of expectations around the product that Twitter never had.

Already, I’m seeing interesting information on my “Nearby” map such as reports of power outages during the DC Snowpocalypse. If the user base continues to grow, I hope to see more of these types of reports from average users (read: not the Scobles and Calacanises of the world) around me. The social space lacks something like this right now, and Google Buzz could be it. (Note: I hope this Nearby functionality comes to the desktop interface too.)

The Minuses: Also-Ran Dynamics, Power User Dominance, and UI

Tight integration with Gmail also has a flip side: it’s doubtful we’ll see a passionate user base develop around Buzz in the same we did around Twitter because of people using it simply because it’s there. This isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world for business. Facebook is not objectively the best place for status updates, Twitter-style, but it is reasonably successful at cloning Twitter functionality because of its scale.

Nonetheless, I personally don’t plan to make Buzz my primary venue for social sharing, with the current exception of sharing Buzz-related comments (how meta of me). I’ve put most of my eggs in the Twitter basket, and syndicate to Facebook as I will to Buzz. In this, there’s a risk that Buzz will become the backwater that Facebook has become for me and other Twitterati. Facebook is plagued by a lower quality of interaction around my posts, though it does bring clicks and interaction I wouldn’t otherwise have, so I continue to use it. Though evidence so far is that Buzz is bringing in more and smarter comments (thanks to easy email integration and my knowing most of my followers personally), I hope that Buzz does not become another Facebook, an also-ran to Twitter in the quality of status updates because of content syndication.

An annoying design flaw in Buzz is how more commented on posts tend to rise to the top. This is intended to solve the discovery problem inherent in Twitter, but without real data on the types of posts I like to interact with, this creates an advantage for the most plugged-in tech blogger like Robert Scoble who can amass the most friends and commenters around any early beta tech release. Scoble and Calacanis dominate my feed; their posts are always being at the top, by virtue of having new comments, at the expense of newer posts from my (real-world) friends. I actively prefer Twitter’s fast-updating stream to this, and its messy way of surfacing the most relevant items through repetition (e.g. retweeting) rather than algorithmically.

Finally, the UI generally could use some polish. Because it’s embedded in Gmail, links to other parts of the application like the friend finder are pretty well buried and outside any discernible navigation structure.

Beyond the Horizon: Status Updates as E-mail Killer

What I hope Buzz is getting at, and it’s partly what Wave has thus far failed to do, is to undermine the entrenched but broken e-mail paradigm. Though one can go back and forth on the virtues of bundling with Gmail, as I have, the fact that it was is the clearest sign yet that Google is serious about this.

Two and a half years ago when my twins were born, I wrote the customary e-mail to a selected list of friends and family with photos and YouTube video, a day after. When my daughter was born late last year, I scrubbed the e-mail and the tedious task of determining who should be on the list by posting it on Twitter and Facebook. As a result, everyone who needed to know knew within the hour, which fulfilled the objective of writing a long e-mail and then some — all in a few dozen characters.

Social media itself is an attack on the tedium and inefficiency of e-mail and I hope Google Buzz takes this even further.

Here is one particular problem I have with e-mail. Other than an out-of-the-office message, we do not have a good way (that’s tightly integrated with the e-mail client) to signal our availability or current disposition to interlocutors. So much of e-mail, and your ability to respond to it, is bound up in the stuff of status updates — brainstorming, in meetings all day, busy right now, going through e-mail. 

As Google delves into the world of status, I’d like to see the equivalent of my GChat status broadcast to all I e-mail — or heck, even just Contacts — complete with green/yellow/red icons and my latest status Buzz or GChat status message. And it goes beyond Google: I would like to see a protocol that integrates this into Outlook and all other clients as well. A particularly interesting or professionally relevant status update — such as a question or request for expertise — might trigger more relevant e-mail and chat messages. Telling people that I’m busy or traveling before they e-mail might cut down on unnecessary e-mail when I am least likely to be able to respond.

This is not quite in Gmail/Buzz yet, and GChat is still a poor substitute. But Google is now in a position to do this, and it might fulfill its stated objective of making e-mail dramatically more useful.

So, what do you think? Will you use Buzz? Sound off in the comments.