Last week, amid the mad snow that fell throughout the DC area Google launched Google Buzz, their social media "solution" that is intended to simplify sharing "content" with your family and friends. Buzz links up with your existing social media sites like Twitter, Flickr, RSS feeds, etc. and pulls that information into your Gmail rather than pushing information out. Google attempted to simplfy the friending process by automatically having the people you email and chat with most follow you, while you followed them in return. This annoyed me at first as I may not necessarily want people I've emailed in the past to be following my every move. Apparently, I was not alone. The people complained and Google responded promptly by switching to an auto-suggest model rather than an auto-follow model.

Given that I spent most of the week digging out from the record-breaking snow I have not had the proper time to dig into Buzz fully, but from what I've seen so far, it certainly puts what your friends are doing front and center IF you use Gmail as your primary mail client. If you don't use Gmail, I'm not sure whether or not you will use Buzz that much. Also, I'm assuming that to really start using Buzz frequently, your friends have to be avid users of Gmail as well. If not, they may never stumble upon it.

Today, Mashable posted that they think Buzz is really going to change the social media landscape and will be digging into it over the next week or so. Given how tight for time we've all been lately, I'm looking forward to seeing what they have to say. Until then, I'll be buzzing around as much as I can.