Google Buzz is making my head spin with just-too-muchery

One, please! Just one! Why can’t we have one service where we toss up all of our pictures, status updates, videos and personal information? With Twitter, FriendFeed, Foursquare, and MySpace Facebook, today’s announcement from Google knocked me back on my ass.

Google Buzz is what plastered news headlines today and it looks like it could actually be a decent social networking service. It will be integrated into Gmail, which millions of us already use, and the interface seems simple enough. The people you e-mail the most will become instant contacts and you can share pictures, videos and all your mundane little thoughts and activities with them. Awesome! But wait, I can already do that with Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. Why is Google Buzz so special and how is it different?

Quite frankly, it’s going to boil down to a matter of taste and privacy. To start, Buzz looks like it has a very nice interface and it’s integrated with services we already use like Google Maps. You can also integrate Twitter, Picasa, Google Reader and Flickr onto it so you don’t have to feel like such a narcissist by visiting every single site to share every little thing you want to project to the world. One thing you will have to consider, however, is whom you’ll be sharing this information with. That’s because your contacts will have your personal e-mail information, and in an age where our actual and perceived privacy shrinks by the day, personal e-mail seems like the last semblance of what life was like before social networking.

It’s honestly hard for me to tell whether this will take off or become a flop like the Google Latitude, the search giant’s location-based social networking service. All I know is, with tons of these social network and media outlets, I’m tempted to just close my computer and hide out in a corner somewhere before it consumes me.