this week was the name. (I could have sworn "Buzz" was .) No, Google knows we are all spending a huge amount of time using social networking applications and that we are using them for everything from sharing baby pictures to making sales contacts. If Google wants to stay in the business of selling our eyeballs (i.e. advertising), it has to keep us on their sites. The surprising thing for me is that Google genuinely believes Buzz will make social networking simpler. Not bloody likely.

"It's increasingly becoming harder and harder to make sense and find the signal in the noise," explained Google VP Bradley Horowitz. I certainly agree with that. Although, to be fair, no one made me set up a personal blog, Tumblr page, Twitter feed, LinkedIn profile, plus Picasa and Flickr Albums. (I also sometimes write for PCMag.com.) That is on me. But Google's solution? Another networking service. Of course!

First the good news, it does work with other sitessort of. As long as they are listed in your Google Profile you can quickly share updates to these services with your Buzz followers. I also like the fact that you can restrict who sees the updates. Baby pictures, for example, are really just for friends and family. If Buzz can consolidate multiple content streams and give users more control over their public/private settings, it will be a huge win.

Plus, by building Buzz directly into Gmail, the service has an instant audience. It is hard to start a social network from scratch, which is why Orkuthowever successful overseasnever made a dent the U.S. Buzz functionality will just appear on millions of Gmail accounts, and users will figure out how to use it over time.

What is the biggest risk to Buzz? Wave. Google Wave, that IM/e-mail/collaboration/scripting/sharing/doanythingyouwantittodo application, is a brilliant piece of engineering. And there are 50, maybe 100 people in the world who know how to use it. (And half of them are on the development team.) Buzz has to be the opposite of Wave: so simple it is effortless. This seamless simplicity is precisely why Google Searchand to a lesser degree Gmail, Google Chat, Google Calendar, Google Voice and other servicesworks so well. Unfortunately, I am afraid Buzz will turn out more like Wave.

I have only been testing Buzz for a short while, but the interface seems cluttered. I have never been a huge fan of threading as the primary tool for managing large streams of information. I vastly prefer the list and search model. So far, it seems like Buzz is trying to do a lot, but it isn't really doing anything that other sites don't do already do better: photo sharing, status updates, professional networking. The real opportunity here is for a service that increases signal and decreases noisethat does less, not more.

Unfortunately, that usually isn't how most software works these days. "We are just drowning in possibility with this product," Horowitz said at the launch event. My thoughts exactly.