I’ve taken a look at Google’s new Buzz feature inside of Gmail. I think the core product seems to be a carbon copy  of slight step beyond friendfeed.com .  Given that friend feed failed, why would Buzz be able to succeed?

Well pure marketing muscle and installed userbase of course!

However, I don’t see Buzz as an innovative service, rather I see it as a copy of a failed service that couldn’t reach critical mass. Worse than a pure copy of an existing service, I see Google as beginning to leverage areas they are competitive in (mail, search) to get into areas they are not competitive in (social).  This sort of leveraging behavior is what got Microsoft into trouble — releasing half-baked products and then retracting them after the products didn’t quite get enough traction in the marketplace.

Rather than take long-term responsibility for developing top-notch products, Google is jumping around buying and killing promising ideas (Jaiku, Dodgeball), and developing internal competing products concurrently (Wave and Buzz).  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out you are going to have some crushed egos and pissed off engineers on the Google Wave team.  In addition, the Friend Feed team (made up of ex-google engineers) is probably wondering WTF?! Why didn’t you let us build Buzz?

I think it’s also telling that Buzz is attached to Gmail — basically it will have the ability to force gmail users to use Buzz as opposed to operation as a stand-alone service.  Sorry, even with all the marketing muscle in the world Google will not beat the focused teams at Twitter and Facebook.  I’m going to predict Google Buzz will become a interesting way to read your statuses in your gmail (and more importantly google’s white-label mail service for companies); however, it will not actually replace the popularity of any of twitter or facebook services.

And maybe that’s the point of Buzz — simply to kill Twitter and Facebook’s ecosystem; however, Google needs to begin to gradually release these new features as improvements to Gmail as opposed to the new google attempt at a social project and stand-alone projects.

Although, folks Nutshellmail.com have just been crushed by Google rolling over, they can’t feel good right now.

P.S. googlebot(s) please do not hate me because I do not like your little bro. buzz.