UPDATE [2/10/10]: Since writing this I have had a chance to use Buzz and have learned that some of the assumptions about it made below aren’t quite right. I’ll be getting a Part II up to look at the service itself in more detail just as soon as some people I’m following start buzzing.

Just a few weeks ago I posted here about the implications of the real-time Web, writing that in conjunction with mobile devices and location aware technology, it would likely result in world where “the Web more easily folds together with ongoing ‘offline’ day-to-day activity.” Today Google has gone ahead and illustrated what I was trying to get at.

This afternoon they announced a new service called Google Buzz. As of this writing it doesn’t seem to be available just yet (to me at least), but there’s a video included with the announcement blog post that gives a pretty good idea of what it’s all about:

That fellow in the video who snaps a photo of a butterfly out in “the real world” and uses the magic of Buzz to instantly distribute it? That’s what I mean by folding together online and offline activities. Sure, there are ways to share photos using social tools now, but only one of them is universal: Email. Buzz is an attempt to update email for the real-time, location-aware, social Web. It’s about getting that butterfly to everyone you feel needs to see it without effort, and without bothering too many people who don’t want to see it.

So in short Google Buzz helps you connect and share with the people in your life. You know, the exact way Facebook describes itself on its landing page. That is in fact a useful comparison for describing what Buzz is. Facebook’s “news feed” is probably one of the most similar (and familiar) tools already out there. As far as more obscure, historical examples go, FriendFeed (which Facebook bought) also had a similar notion of aggregating all the social Web activity a user was concerned about following in a single place.

What sets Buzz apart is that it’s evolving out of the Gmail inbox, not just in terms of user interface, but more importantly in terms of user identity and, even more importantly in terms of a user’s contacts. FriendFeed took a significant time investment to get working because one had to enter a lot of information about what one wanted to follow and/or cajole one’s contacts to join and enter all their information. Facebook (at least from this user’s perspective) suffers from the opposite problem—way, way too much information that it takes much too much work to sort through.

The Gmail/Google account context is different. I think it’s safe to say that people have fewer Google contacts (people who show up in the Gchat widget within Gmail) than they do Facebook friends. These Google contacts are established (by default) based on exchanged emails. Facebook, by virtue of its size, ubiquity, publicness, and the culture around it leads to contacts being established by encountering another individual at all, no matter how fleetingly.

And for all of Facebook’s new feature releases, its friendship connections are still basically “dumb”. Gmail has released little, seemingly novelty features like notifications for when one sends an email to a group but leaves out someone normally associated with that group of addresses. In the context of a social sharing tool that sort of grouping and organizing of relationships is actually incredibly powerful. Not least because it’s information that the system learns from the user’s behavior, rather than demanding that the user enter.

Gmail itself is organized primarily around chronology and conversation threading, with little interrupting boxes for instant messages. There are some widgets one can add and other customizations but by-and-large it’s about sending messages to a fairly circumscribed group of regular contacts. Facebook is, by comparison, utter chaos.

The language used in the official Google blog post fits pretty well with this reading of things:

Today, communication on the web has evolved beyond email and chat — people are sharing photos with friends and family, commenting on news happening around them, and telling the world what they’re up to in real-time. This new social sharing is valuable, but it means there’s a lot more stuff to sort through, and it’s harder to get past status updates and engage in meaningful discussions.

Sound familiar at all, coming from Google? It should. Remember the last time the Web went into a tizzy over Google announcing a reinvention of email? Just about nine months ago, also from the official Google blog:

[T]wo of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the ’60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point…A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

The Jens mentioned there is Jens Rasmussen and the post is by his brother Lars, describing the genesis of what would become the much-talked about Google Wave.

I’m not the only one who thinks Buzz and Wave have more than a just a little in common. TechCrunch’s coverage of the Buzz launch is headlined: “If Google Wave Is The Future, Google Buzz Is The Present”. The post concludes with:

The big question is: will Gmail users buy into this quick sharing? Google thinks so because it’s a part of the evolution from email, to IM, to status updates. It’s also, in their eyes, a part of the evolution to the next step, Google Wave. So far, the public has proven to be not ready for Wave yet. But Buzz might be the perfect tool in getting people to think about communicating in a way beyond email and IM. Or it may be another misstep in Google’s social quest. [Emphasis Added]

This is just one example of what is bound to be Web-wide chatter about the new service, and the point that Google hasn’t had the best of luck with the really social aspects of the Web is an important one. However, I think it’s a big mistake to see Buzz as a stepping stone on the way to Wave. Buzz isn’t just “Wave lite”, created because “the public has proven to be not ready for Wave yet” (also, it’s worth pointing out that Wave hasn’t even been officially released beyond a limited preview version yet, so it’s not really ready for the public either). On the contrary, I think Buzz and Wave have different applications and fill different needs. One needn’t be a step to the other because there is good reason to have both at the same time.

Specifically, I think that Buzz is a tool for individuals and Wave is a tool for groups. Buzz is about the on-going personal practice of using technology to communicate and share, Wave is about collaboration to accomplish goals. Buzz is a big move by Google to get involved in the social Web in a way it hasn’t before, and that’s quite different from the agenda with Wave—I think Wave’s ultimate destiny lies more with the enterprise (or other organizational contexts) than with “the public” TechCrunch suggests isn’t ready for it.

By way of illustration, let’s make some reductive comparisons and line up the Buzz/Wave dichotomy with one I set up in a recent post and another I haven’t gotten around to writing about yet:

Buzz	Wave
“Status Updating”	“Digital Publishing”
iPhone	iPad

Status updating vs. digital publishing was the subject of a post from the end of December:

So on the one hand there is status updating (an increasingly popular, real time–oriented form of online social communication and content creation/sharing) and on the other there is digital publishing (producing larger units of content like long blog posts or things resembling articles that appear in print).

I know I’m pushing it with the block quotes (and the self-reference), but here’s the explanation of that pair that I think is relevant:

[S]tatus updating can be done from your phone. These are usually short messages and a typo every so often isn’t the end of the world. Digital publishing is much more of a sit-down-at-a-desk sort of affair. And this is even somewhat supported (or more accurately suggested) by the data from Pew indicating that individuals who connect to the Internet from their mobile device is a key group responsible for driving this year’s increase in status updating.

Meanwhile, digital publishing continues to define itself. In the past few months especially there has been a lot of buzz about magazines and newspapers potentially shifting to tablet computer devices (Mag+, Sports Illustrated, the elusive and magical Apple tablet, among others). Online-only outlets like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast become more established each day. Most interesting of all might be a “post” from Smashing Magazine, the online Web design publication, about “the death of the boring blog post“. It’s a call for Web sites to start laying out individual pieces separately with their own content-appropriate graphics—to make what they call “blogazines.”

Buzz is a tool one might use to do activities that fall under the broad heading of “status updates”. They get zipped out to a bunch of personal contacts who can easily browse all these bite-sized communiques on their iPhone (or other device). Wave is a tool one might use to compose that ill-defined future sort of content that the iPad is uniquely suited to consume. Wave facilitates incorporation of all sorts of rich media content and, because it’s an extensible platform, could even be used to develop new sorts of embedded interactive elements. Even absent such fancy stuff, Wave is built for collaboration, editing, revision, reversion…it’s a little much for sending one’s friends that photo of a butterfly.

In short, column one is about one’s own time. Column two is about things people hope to be paid for. That doesn’t mean companies won’t someday race to “get on Buzz” the way they’re tripping over themselves to get on Twitter and Facebook, or that groups of friends won’t use Wave for totally noncommercial purposes. The important thing is that in the main an individual or an entity “gets on” Buzz (becomes present on that platform indefinitely); members of a group use Wave for particular purposes (which are presumably discrete).

While being on Buzz might be a continuous state, individual posts or updates (buzzes?) are momentary. That fact is illustrated by Buzz’s support for location-aware updating from a mobile device. If units of Buzz content/communication were meant to be composed over time, how could they be mapped in space? In that sense Buzz might be best compared to Twitter—real-time, location-aware (though Twitter’s version of that feature hasn’t gotten much attention), continuously connected social communication.

But there’s a critical difference the separates Buzz from Twitter, and also from the light-weight social blogging platform Tumblr, which one might also be tempted to make a comparison to. At least as far as I can tell, Buzz content doesn’t publish directly to the public Web. You can’t find a Buzz update by searching Google the same way you can’t find an email or a Facebook wall post by searching Google. Twitter and Tumblr both broadcast out to anyone who wants to listen. Buzz, like Facebook, happens within a more bounded system. [NOTE: This is incorrect.]

There are some caveats to that. Twitter and Tumblr both have some features that only work from within their own interface and for users that have an account on the service (notably retweeting/reblogging and starring/liking). Also, Google has given assurances that Buzz will be very developer-friendly, meaning there will certainly be a way to export one’s content elsewhere (and probably do many other things, even import material from networks as ostensibly closed as Facebook).

Tumblr is as good a note as any to end on. While it offers some integration with Twitter, it mostly stands alone. As mentioned, it also publishes users’ content directly to the public Web (as well as through the internal follow-based dashboard). It’s really quite simple. From a certain perspective (mine), it makes Buzz look as needlessly involved as Buzz makes Facebook look to some (again, me).

Buzz might turn out to be an absolutely fantastic tool, but its potential for success rests largely on leveraging its built-in initial user base of Gmail users. Not everyone is going to be ready to map their email contacts directly onto their social content sharing network. Having Buzz bundled with everything else associated with a Gmail address/Google account is just as likely to make it irritating to incorporate into one’s online routine as it is to encourage adoption. Something like Tumblr, on the other hand, gets to operate in its own separately defined and managed context. (Better to do one thing well…)

Part I ends here because there’s not much further to go with this without having had the chance to actually play around with the thing. Part II will (more accurately, may) come once I’ve done so and can move beyond conjecture.