It’s interesting to see Google entering the social-networking arena with Google Buzz – facing up against the giants in what I hope is another game changing advance.

However, I’m still waiting to see Google Wave take the world by storm – it’s a wonderful technology but displaced by traditional user habits.

I do think that if Google Wave was integrated with GMail (and given the Google Buzz precedent, it’s a possibility) creating a hybrid solution in the way they have with Buzz then it’d get much more traction in the world – we want a converged place for all of our online communications and Google Mail can serve this purpose perfectly.

Hot Buzz: Will Google use its power to usurp Facebook with it's own "Buzz" social platform?

A Mashable survey suggests that of its voting audience, 60% intend to use Google Buzz.  With a primary audience of IT savvy users, this suggests that there will be a strong start with a loyal market of early adopters. Although to be fair only 10% said it would be their primary social networking tool.  I’m sure that if they’d included facebook integration then this would be much higher.

Google Buzz is a feature for Google Mail, so users need to have a Google Mail account.  If you already have a Gmail account, Google Buzz access will be added automatically.  So while I wait for my Gmail account to get Google Buzzified, all I can do is consider the feature set that has been announced.

Certainly some of the Geo-location components look very interesting but only if my friends are using Google Buzz too. One thing that strikes me as being missing from the announcement, and therefore potentially missing altogether, is Google Translate integration. In GMail this feature has been in Labs for almost a year, so I’m not hopeful of a fully integrated, stable solution with the release of Google Buzz.

Look familiar? Google's new Buzz social platform

I have friends in different countries and when reading status updates, and especially reading comments of friends-of-friends in different countries, the comments are not always in English. So having a very quick and simple way of getting a Google Translate version of a comment or status update would be extremely useful.

Of course if there was a good API, I’d be happy to contribute – my disappointment with Google Mail is that I can’t write plugins for it, so we can’t even do this ourselves to use the Applied Language Machine Translation system to do the instant translations.

Anyway, I’ll get back to waiting for Buzz and continuing to hope that they will include Google Translate integration, otherwise I’ll have to wait for the full developer API to see what we can do ourselves.

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